Bleak House
nothing to say to them and they had better not wait. They do wait,
however, with the perseverance of military tactics, and at last the
bell rings again and the client in possession comes out of Mr.
Tulkinghorn’s room.
The client is a handsome old lady, no other than Mrs. Rouncewell,
housekeeper at Chesney Wold. She comes out of the sanctuary with a
fair old-fashioned curtsy and softly shuts the door. She is treated
with some distinction there, for the clerk steps out of his pew to
show her through the outer office and to let her out. The old lady is
thanking him for his attention when she observes the comrades in
waiting.
“I beg your pardon, sir, but I think those gentlemen are military?”
The clerk referring the question to them with his eye, and Mr. George
not turning round from the almanac over the fire-place. Mr. Bagnet
takes upon himself to reply, “Yes, ma’am. Formerly.”
“I thought so. I was sure of it. My heart warms, gentlemen, at the
sight of you. It always does at the sight of such. God bless you,
gentlemen! You’ll excuse an old woman, but I had a son once who went
for a soldier. A fine handsome youth he was, and good in his bold
way, though some people did disparage him to his poor mother. I ask
your pardon for troubling you, sir. God bless you, gentlemen!”
“Same to you, ma’am!” returns Mr. Bagnet with right good will.
There is something very touching in the earnestness of the old lady’s
voice and in the tremble that goes through her quaint old figure. But
Mr. George is so occupied with the almanac over the fire-place
(calculating the coming months by it perhaps) that he does not look
round until she has gone away and the door is closed upon her.
“George,” Mr. Bagnet gruffly whispers when he does turn from the
almanac at last. “Don’t be cast down! ‘Why, soldiers, why—should we
be melancholy, boys?’ Cheer up, my hearty!”
The clerk having now again gone in to say that they are still there
and Mr. Tulkinghorn being heard to return with some irascibility,
“Let ’em come in then!” they pass into the great room with the
painted ceiling and find him standing before the fire.
“Now, you men, what do you want? Sergeant, I told you the last time I
saw you that I don’t desire your company here.”
Sergeant replies—dashed within the last few minutes as to his usual
manner of speech, and even as to his usual carriage—that he has
received this letter, has been to Mr. Smallweed about it, and has
been referred there.
“I have nothing to say to you,” rejoins Mr. Tulkinghorn. “If you get
into debt, you must pay your debts or take the consequences. You have
no occasion to come here to learn that, I suppose?”
Sergeant is sorry to say that he is not prepared with the money.
“Very well! Then the other man—this man, if this is he—must pay it
for you.”
Sergeant is sorry to add that the other man is not prepared with the
money either.
“Very well! Then you must pay it between you or you must both be sued
for it and both suffer. You have had the money and must refund it.
You are not to pocket other people’s pounds, shillings, and pence and
escape scot-free.”
The lawyer sits down in his easy-chair and stirs the fire. Mr. George
hopes he will have the goodness to—“I tell you, sergeant, I have
nothing to say to you. I don’t like your associates and don’t want
you here. This matter is not at all in my course of practice and is
not in my office. Mr. Smallweed is good enough to offer these affairs
to me, but they are not in my way. You must go to Melchisedech’s in
Clifford’s Inn.”
“I must make an apology to you, sir,” says Mr. George, “for pressing
myself upon you with so little encouragement—which is almost as
unpleasant to me as it can be to you—but would you let me say a
private word to you?”
Mr. Tulkinghorn rises with his hands in his pockets and walks into
one of the window recesses. “Now! I have no time to waste.” In the
midst of his perfect assumption of indifference, he directs a sharp
look at the trooper, taking care to stand with his own back to the
light and to have the other with his face towards it.
“Well, sir,” says Mr. George, “this man with me is the other party
implicated in this unfortunate affair—nominally, only nominally—and
my sole object is to prevent his getting into trouble on my account.
He is a most respectable man with a wife and family, formerly in the
Royal Artillery—”
“My friend, I don’t care a pinch of snuff for the whole Royal
Artillery establishment—officers, men, tumbrils, waggons, horses,
guns, and ammunition.”
“’Tis likely, sir. But I care a good deal for Bagnet and his wife and
family being injured on my account. And if I could bring them through
this matter, I should have no help for it but to give up without any
other consideration what you wanted of me the other day.”
“Have you got it here?”
“I have got it here, sir.”
“Sergeant,” the lawyer proceeds in his dry passionless manner, far
more hopeless in the dealing with than any amount of vehemence, “make
up your mind while I speak to you, for this is final. After I have
finished speaking I have closed the subject, and I won’t re-open it.
Understand that. You can leave here, for a few days, what you say you
have brought here if you choose; you can take it away at once if you
choose. In case you choose to leave it here, I can do this for you—I
can replace this matter on its old footing, and I can go so far
besides as to give you a written undertaking that this man Bagnet
shall never be troubled in any way until you have been proceeded
against to the utmost, that your means shall be exhausted before the
creditor looks to his. This is in fact all but freeing him. Have you
decided?”
The trooper puts his hand into his breast and answers with a long
breath, “I must do it, sir.”
So Mr. Tulkinghorn, putting on his spectacles, sits down and writes
the undertaking, which he slowly reads and explains to Bagnet, who
has all this time been staring at the ceiling and who puts his hand
on his bald head again, under this new verbal shower-bath, and seems
exceedingly in need of the old girl through whom to express his
sentiments. The trooper then takes from his breast-pocket a folded
paper, which he lays with an unwilling hand at the lawyer’s elbow.
“’Tis only a letter of instructions, sir. The last I ever had from
him.”
Look at a millstone, Mr. George, for some change in its expression,
and you will find it quite as soon as in the face of Mr. Tulkinghorn
when he opens and reads the letter! He refolds it and lays it in his
desk with a countenance as unperturbable as death.
Nor has he anything more to say or do but to nod once in the same
frigid and discourteous manner and to say briefly, “You can go. Show
these men out, there!” Being shown out, they repair to Mr. Bagnet’s
residence to dine.
Boiled beef and greens constitute the day’s variety on the former
repast of boiled pork and greens, and Mrs. Bagnet serves out the meal
in the same way and seasons it with the best of temper, being that
rare sort of old girl that she receives Good to her arms without a
hint that it might be Better and catches light from any little spot
of darkness near her. The spot on this occasion is the darkened brow
of Mr. George; he is unusually thoughtful and depressed. At first
Mrs. Bagnet trusts to the combined endearments of Quebec and Malta to
restore him, but finding those young ladies sensible that their
existing Bluffy is not the Bluffy of their usual frolicsome
acquaintance, she winks off the light infantry and leaves him to
deploy at leisure on the open ground of the domestic hearth.
But he does not. He remains in close order, clouded and depressed.
During the lengthy cleaning up and pattening process, when he and Mr.
Bagnet are supplied with their pipes, he is no better than he was at
dinner. He forgets to smoke, looks at the fire and ponders, lets his
pipe out, fills the breast of Mr. Bagnet with perturbation and dismay
by showing that he has no enjoyment of tobacco.
Therefore when Mrs. Bagnet at last appears, rosy from the
invigorating pail, and sits down to her work, Mr. Bagnet growls, “Old
girl!” and winks monitions to her to find out what’s the matter.
“Why, George!” says Mrs. Bagnet, quietly threading her needle. “How
low you are!”
“Am I? Not good company? Well, I am afraid I am not.”
“He ain’t at all like Bluffy, mother!” cries little Malta.
“Because he ain’t well, I think, mother,” adds Quebec.
“Sure that’s a bad sign not to be like Bluffy, too!” returns the
trooper, kissing the young damsels. “But it’s true,” with a sigh,
“true, I am afraid. These little ones are always right!”
“George,” says Mrs. Bagnet, working busily, “if I thought you cross
enough to think of anything that a shrill old soldier’s wife—who
could have bitten her tongue off afterwards and ought to have done it
almost—said this morning, I don’t know what I shouldn’t say to you
now.”
“My kind soul of a darling,” returns the trooper. “Not a morsel of
it.”
“Because really and truly, George, what I said and meant to say was
that I trusted Lignum to you and was sure you’d bring him through it.
And you HAVE brought him through it, noble!”
“Thankee, my dear!” says George. “I am glad of your good opinion.”
In giving Mrs. Bagnet’s hand, with her work in it, a friendly
shake—for she took her seat beside him—the trooper’s attention is
attracted to her face. After looking at it for a little while as she
plies her needle, he looks to young Woolwich, sitting on his stool in
the corner, and beckons that fifer to him.
“See there, my boy,” says George, very gently smoothing the mother’s
hair with his hand, “there’s a good loving forehead for you! All
bright with love of you, my boy. A little touched by the sun and the
weather through following your father about and taking care of you,
but as fresh and wholesome as a ripe apple on a tree.”
Mr. Bagnet’s face expresses, so far as in its wooden material lies,
the highest approbation and acquiescence.
“The time will come, my boy,” pursues the trooper, “when this hair of
your mother’s will be grey, and this forehead all crossed and
re-crossed with wrinkles, and a fine old lady she’ll be then. Take
care, while you are young, that you can think in those days, ‘I never
whitened a hair of her dear head—I never marked a sorrowful line in
her face!’ For of all the many things that you can think of when you
are a man, you had better have THAT by you, Woolwich!”
Mr. George concludes by rising from his chair, seating the boy beside
his mother in it, and saying, with something of a hurry about him,
that he’ll smoke his pipe in the street a bit.
CHAPTER XXXV
Esther’s Narrative
I lay ill through several weeks, and the usual tenor of my life
became like an old remembrance. But this was not the effect of time
so much as of the change in all my habits made by the helplessness
and inaction of a sick-room. Before I had been confined to it many
days, everything else seemed to have retired into a remote distance
where there was little or no separation between the various stages of
my life which had been really divided by years. In falling ill, I
seemed to have crossed a dark lake and to have left all my
experiences, mingled together by the great distance, on the healthy
shore.
My housekeeping duties, though at first it caused me great anxiety to
think that they were unperformed, were soon as far off as the oldest
of the old duties at Greenleaf or the summer afternoons when I went
home from school with my portfolio under my arm, and my childish
shadow at my side, to my godmother’s house. I had never known before
how short life really was and into how small a space the mind could
put it.
While I was very ill, the way in which these divisions of time became