Bleak House by Charles Dickens (the top 100 crime novels of all time .txt) 📖

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

recrossed 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.