Bleak House
and a young woman, with a swelled face bound up in a flannel bandage
blowing the fire of the drawing-room (now connected by an open door
with Mrs. Jellyby’s room) and choking dreadfully. It smoked to that
degree, in short, that we all sat coughing and crying with the
windows open for half an hour, during which Mrs. Jellyby, with the
same sweetness of temper, directed letters about Africa. Her being so
employed was, I must say, a great relief to me, for Richard told us
that he had washed his hands in a pie-dish and that they had found
the kettle on his dressing-table, and he made Ada laugh so that they
made me laugh in the most ridiculous manner.
Soon after seven o’clock we went down to dinner, carefully, by Mrs.
Jellyby’s advice, for the stair-carpets, besides being very deficient
in stair-wires, were so torn as to be absolute traps. We had a fine
cod-fish, a piece of roast beef, a dish of cutlets, and a pudding; an
excellent dinner, if it had had any cooking to speak of, but it was
almost raw. The young woman with the flannel bandage waited, and
dropped everything on the table wherever it happened to go, and never
moved it again until she put it on the stairs. The person I had seen
in pattens, who I suppose to have been the cook, frequently came and
skirmished with her at the door, and there appeared to be ill will
between them.
All through dinner—which was long, in consequence of such accidents
as the dish of potatoes being mislaid in the coal skuttle and the
handle of the corkscrew coming off and striking the young woman in
the chin—Mrs. Jellyby preserved the evenness of her disposition. She
told us a great deal that was interesting about Borrioboola-Gha and
the natives, and received so many letters that Richard, who sat by
her, saw four envelopes in the gravy at once. Some of the letters
were proceedings of ladies’ committees or resolutions of ladies’
meetings, which she read to us; others were applications from people
excited in various ways about the cultivation of coffee, and natives;
others required answers, and these she sent her eldest daughter from
the table three or four times to write. She was full of business and
undoubtedly was, as she had told us, devoted to the cause.
I was a little curious to know who a mild bald gentleman in
spectacles was, who dropped into a vacant chair (there was no top or
bottom in particular) after the fish was taken away and seemed
passively to submit himself to Borrioboola-Gha but not to be actively
interested in that settlement. As he never spoke a word, he might
have been a native but for his complexion. It was not until we left
the table and he remained alone with Richard that the possibility of
his being Mr. Jellyby ever entered my head. But he WAS Mr. Jellyby;
and a loquacious young man called Mr. Quale, with large shining knobs
for temples and his hair all brushed to the back of his head, who
came in the evening, and told Ada he was a philanthropist, also
informed her that he called the matrimonial alliance of Mrs. Jellyby
with Mr. Jellyby the union of mind and matter.
This young man, besides having a great deal to say for himself about
Africa and a project of his for teaching the coffee colonists to
teach the natives to turn piano-forte legs and establish an export
trade, delighted in drawing Mrs. Jellyby out by saying, “I believe
now, Mrs. Jellyby, you have received as many as from one hundred and
fifty to two hundred letters respecting Africa in a single day, have
you not?” or, “If my memory does not deceive me, Mrs. Jellyby, you
once mentioned that you had sent off five thousand circulars from one
post-office at one time?”—always repeating Mrs. Jellyby’s answer to
us like an interpreter. During the whole evening, Mr. Jellyby sat in
a corner with his head against the wall as if he were subject to low
spirits. It seemed that he had several times opened his mouth when
alone with Richard after dinner, as if he had something on his mind,
but had always shut it again, to Richard’s extreme confusion, without
saying anything.
Mrs. Jellyby, sitting in quite a nest of waste paper, drank coffee
all the evening and dictated at intervals to her eldest daughter. She
also held a discussion with Mr. Quale, of which the subject seemed to
be—if I understood it—the brotherhood of humanity, and gave
utterance to some beautiful sentiments. I was not so attentive an
auditor as I might have wished to be, however, for Peepy and the
other children came flocking about Ada and me in a corner of the
drawing-room to ask for another story; so we sat down among them and
told them in whispers “Puss in Boots” and I don’t know what else
until Mrs. Jellyby, accidentally remembering them, sent them to bed.
As Peepy cried for me to take him to bed, I carried him upstairs,
where the young woman with the flannel bandage charged into the midst
of the little family like a dragon and overturned them into cribs.
After that I occupied myself in making our room a little tidy and in
coaxing a very cross fire that had been lighted to burn, which at
last it did, quite brightly. On my return downstairs, I felt that
Mrs. Jellyby looked down upon me rather for being so frivolous, and I
was sorry for it, though at the same time I knew that I had no higher
pretensions.
It was nearly midnight before we found an opportunity of going to
bed, and even then we left Mrs. Jellyby among her papers drinking
coffee and Miss Jellyby biting the feather of her pen.
“What a strange house!” said Ada when we got upstairs. “How curious
of my cousin Jarndyce to send us here!”
“My love,” said I, “it quite confuses me. I want to understand it,
and I can’t understand it at all.”
“What?” asked Ada with her pretty smile.
“All this, my dear,” said I. “It MUST be very good of Mrs. Jellyby to
take such pains about a scheme for the benefit of natives—and
yet—Peepy and the housekeeping!”
Ada laughed and put her arm about my neck as I stood looking at the
fire, and told me I was a quiet, dear, good creature and had won her
heart. “You are so thoughtful, Esther,” she said, “and yet so
cheerful! And you do so much, so unpretendingly! You would make a
home out of even this house.”
My simple darling! She was quite unconscious that she only praised
herself and that it was in the goodness of her own heart that she
made so much of me!
“May I ask you a question?” said I when we had sat before the fire a
little while.
“Five hundred,” said Ada.
“Your cousin, Mr. Jarndyce. I owe so much to him. Would you mind
describing him to me?”
Shaking her golden hair, Ada turned her eyes upon me with such
laughing wonder that I was full of wonder too, partly at her beauty,
partly at her surprise.
“Esther!” she cried.
“My dear!”
“You want a description of my cousin Jarndyce?”
“My dear, I never saw him.”
“And I never saw him!” returned Ada.
Well, to be sure!
No, she had never seen him. Young as she was when her mama died, she
remembered how the tears would come into her eyes when she spoke of
him and of the noble generosity of his character, which she had said
was to be trusted above all earthly things; and Ada trusted it. Her
cousin Jarndyce had written to her a few months ago—“a plain, honest
letter,” Ada said—proposing the arrangement we were now to enter on
and telling her that “in time it might heal some of the wounds made
by the miserable Chancery suit.” She had replied, gratefully
accepting his proposal. Richard had received a similar letter and had
made a similar response. He HAD seen Mr. Jarndyce once, but only
once, five years ago, at Winchester school. He had told Ada, when
they were leaning on the screen before the fire where I found them,
that he recollected him as “a bluff, rosy fellow.” This was the
utmost description Ada could give me.
It set me thinking so that when Ada was asleep, I still remained
before the fire, wondering and wondering about Bleak House, and
wondering and wondering that yesterday morning should seem so long
ago. I don’t know where my thoughts had wandered when they were
recalled by a tap at the door.
I opened it softly and found Miss Jellyby shivering there with a
broken candle in a broken candlestick in one hand and an egg-cup in
the other.
“Good night!” she said very sulkily.
“Good night!” said I.
“May I come in?” she shortly and unexpectedly asked me in the same
sulky way.
“Certainly,” said I. “Don’t wake Miss Clare.”
She would not sit down, but stood by the fire dipping her inky middle
finger in the egg-cup, which contained vinegar, and smearing it over
the ink stains on her face, frowning the whole time and looking very
gloomy.
“I wish Africa was dead!” she said on a sudden.
I was going to remonstrate.
“I do!” she said “Don’t talk to me, Miss Summerson. I hate it and
detest it. It’s a beast!”
I told her she was tired, and I was sorry. I put my hand upon her
head, and touched her forehead, and said it was hot now but would be
cool to-morrow. She still stood pouting and frowning at me, but
presently put down her egg-cup and turned softly towards the bed
where Ada lay.
“She is very pretty!” she said with the same knitted brow and in the
same uncivil manner.
I assented with a smile.
“An orphan. Ain’t she?”
“Yes.”
“But knows a quantity, I suppose? Can dance, and play music, and
sing? She can talk French, I suppose, and do geography, and globes,
and needlework, and everything?”
“No doubt,” said I.
“I can’t,” she returned. “I can’t do anything hardly, except write.
I’m always writing for Ma. I wonder you two were not ashamed of
yourselves to come in this afternoon and see me able to do nothing
else. It was like your ill nature. Yet you think yourselves very
fine, I dare say!”
I could see that the poor girl was near crying, and I resumed my
chair without speaking and looked at her (I hope) as mildly as I felt
towards her.
“It’s disgraceful,” she said. “You know it is. The whole house is
disgraceful. The children are disgraceful. I’M disgraceful. Pa’s
miserable, and no wonder! Priscilla drinks—she’s always drinking.
It’s a great shame and a great story of you if you say you didn’t
smell her to-day. It was as bad as a public-house, waiting at dinner;
you know it was!”
“My dear, I don’t know it,” said I.
“You do,” she said very shortly. “You shan’t say you don’t. You do!”
“Oh, my dear!” said I. “If you won’t let me speak—”
“You’re speaking now. You know you are. Don’t tell stories, Miss
Summerson.”
“My dear,” said I, “as long as you won’t hear me out—”
“I don’t want to hear you out.”
“Oh, yes, I think you do,” said I, “because that would be so very
unreasonable. I did not know what you tell me because the servant did
not come near me at dinner; but I don’t doubt what you tell me, and I
am sorry to hear it.”
“You needn’t make a merit of that,” said she.
“No, my dear,” said I. “That would be very foolish.”
She was still standing by the bed, and now stooped down (but still
with the same discontented face) and kissed Ada. That done, she came
softly back and stood by the side of my chair. Her bosom was heaving
in a distressful manner that I greatly pitied, but I thought it
better not to speak.
“I wish I was dead!” she broke out. “I wish we were all dead. It
would be a great deal better for us.”
In a moment afterwards, she knelt on the ground at my side, hid her
face in my dress, passionately begged my pardon, and wept. I
comforted her and would have raised her, but she cried no, no; she
wanted to stay there!
“You used to teach girls,” she said, “If you could only have taught
me, I could have learnt from you! I am so very miserable, and I like
you so much!”
I could not persuade her to sit by me or to do anything but move a