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

from me into the wood. I was alone, and calm and quiet below

me in the sun and shade lay the old house, with its terraces and

turrets, on which there had seemed to me to be such complete repose

when I first saw it, but which now looked like the obdurate and

unpitying watcher of my mother’s misery.

 

Stunned as I was, as weak and helpless at first as I had ever been

in my sick chamber, the necessity of guarding against the danger of

discovery, or even of the remotest suspicion, did me service. I

took such precautions as I could to hide from Charley that I had

been crying, and I constrained myself to think of every sacred

obligation that there was upon me to be careful and collected. It

was not a little while before I could succeed or could even

restrain bursts of grief, but after an hour or so I was better and

felt that I might return. I went home very slowly and told

Charley, whom I found at the gate looking for me, that I had been

tempted to extend my walk after Lady Dedlock had left me and that I

was over-tired and would lie down. Safe in my own room, I read the

letter. I clearly derived from it—and that was much then—that I

had not been abandoned by my mother. Her elder and only sister,

the godmother of my childhood, discovering signs of life in me when

I had been laid aside as dead, had in her stern sense of duty, with

no desire or willingness that I should live, reared me in rigid

secrecy and had never again beheld my mother’s face from within a

few hours of my birth. So strangely did I hold my place in this

world that until within a short time back I had never, to my own

mother’s knowledge, breathed—had been buried—had never been

endowed with life—had never borne a name. When she had first seen

me in the church she had been startled and had thought of what

would have been like me if it had ever lived, and had lived on, but

that was all then.

 

What more the letter told me needs not to be repeated here. It has

its own times and places in my story.

 

My first care was to burn what my mother had written and to consume

even its ashes. I hope it may not appear very unnatural or bad in

me that I then became heavily sorrowful to think I had ever been

reared. That I felt as if I knew it would have been better and

happier for many people if indeed I had never breathed. That I had

a terror of myself as the danger and the possible disgrace of my

own mother and of a proud family name. That I was so confused and

shaken as to be possessed by a belief that it was right and had

been intended that I should die in my birth, and that it was wrong

and not intended that I should be then alive.

 

These are the real feelings that I had. I fell asleep worn out,

and when I awoke I cried afresh to think that I was back in the

world with my load of trouble for others. I was more than ever

frightened of myself, thinking anew of her against whom I was a

witness, of the owner of Chesney Wold, of the new and terrible

meaning of the old words now moaning in my ear like a surge upon

the shore, “Your mother, Esther, was your disgrace, and you are

hers. The time will come—and soon enough—when you will

understand this better, and will feel it too, as no one save a

woman can.” With them, those other words returned, “Pray daily

that the sins of others be not visited upon your head.” I could

not disentangle all that was about me, and I felt as if the blame

and the shame were all in me, and the visitation had come down.

 

The day waned into a gloomy evening, overcast and sad, and I still

contended with the same distress. I went out alone, and after

walking a little in the park, watching the dark shades falling on

the trees and the fitful flight of the bats, which sometimes almost

touched me, was attracted to the house for the first time. Perhaps

I might not have gone near it if I had been in a stronger frame of

mind. As it was, I took the path that led close by it.

 

I did not dare to linger or to look up, but I passed before the

terrace garden with its fragrant odours, and its broad walks, and

its well-kept beds and smooth turf; and I saw how beautiful and

grave it was, and how the old stone balustrades and parapets, and

wide flights of shallow steps, were seamed by time and weather; and

how the trained moss and ivy grew about them, and around the old

stone pedestal of the sun-dial; and I heard the fountain falling.

Then the way went by long lines of dark windows diversified by

turreted towers and porches of eccentric shapes, where old stone

lions and grotesque monsters bristled outside dens of shadow and

snarled at the evening gloom over the escutcheons they held in

their grip. Thence the path wound underneath a gateway, and

through a court-yard where the principal entrance was (I hurried

quickly on), and by the stables where none but deep voices seemed

to be, whether in the murmuring of the wind through the strong mass

of ivy holding to a high red wall, or in the low complaining of the

weathercock, or in the barking of the dogs, or in the slow striking

of a clock. So, encountering presently a sweet smell of limes,

whose rustling I could hear, I turned with the turning of the path

to the south front, and there above me were the balustrades of the

Ghost’s Walk and one lighted window that might be my mother’s.

 

The way was paved here, like the terrace overhead, and my footsteps

from being noiseless made an echoing sound upon the flags.

Stopping to look at nothing, but seeing all I did see as I went, I

was passing quickly on, and in a few moments should have passed the

lighted window, when my echoing footsteps brought it suddenly into

my mind that there was a dreadful truth in the legend of the

Ghost’s Walk, that it was I who was to bring calamity upon the

stately house and that my warning feet were haunting it even then.

Seized with an augmented terror of myself which turned me cold, I

ran from myself and everything, retraced the way by which I had

come, and never paused until I had gained the lodge-gate, and the

park lay sullen and black behind me.

 

Not before I was alone in my own room for the night and had again

been dejected and unhappy there did I begin to know how wrong and

thankless this state was. But from my darling who was coming on

the morrow, I found a joyful letter, full of such loving

anticipation that I must have been of marble if it had not moved

me; from my guardian, too, I found another letter, asking me to

tell Dame Durden, if I should see that little woman anywhere, that

they had moped most pitiably without her, that the housekeeping was

going to rack and ruin, that nobody else could manage the keys, and

that everybody in and about the house declared it was not the same

house and was becoming rebellious for her return. Two such letters

together made me think how far beyond my deserts I was beloved and

how happy I ought to be. That made me think of all my past life;

and that brought me, as it ought to have done before, into a better

condition.

 

For I saw very well that I could not have been intended to die, or

I should never have lived; not to say should never have been

reserved for such a happy life. I saw very well how many things

had worked together for my welfare, and that if the sins of the

fathers were sometimes visited upon the children, the phrase did

not mean what I had in the morning feared it meant. I knew I was

as innocent of my birth as a queen of hers and that before my

Heavenly Father I should not be punished for birth nor a queen

rewarded for it. I had had experience, in the shock of that very

day, that I could, even thus soon, find comforting reconcilements

to the change that had fallen on me. I renewed my resolutions and

prayed to be strengthened in them, pouring out my heart for myself

and for my unhappy mother and feeling that the darkness of the

morning was passing away. It was not upon my sleep; and when the

next day’s light awoke me, it was gone.

 

My dear girl was to arrive at five o’clock in the afternoon. How

to help myself through the intermediate time better than by taking

a long walk along the road by which she was to come, I did not

know; so Charley and I and Stubbs—Stubbs saddled, for we never

drove him after the one great occasion—made a long expedition

along that road and back. On our return, we held a great review of

the house and garden and saw that everything was in its prettiest

condition, and had the bird out ready as an important part of the

establishment.

 

There were more than two full hours yet to elapse before she could

come, and in that interval, which seemed a long one, I must confess

I was nervously anxious about my altered looks. I loved my darling

so well that I was more concerned for their effect on her than on

any one. I was not in this slight distress because I at all

repined—I am quite certain I did not, that day—but, I thought,

would she be wholly prepared? When she first saw me, might she not

be a little shocked and disappointed? Might it not prove a little

worse than she expected? Might she not look for her old Esther and

not find her? Might she not have to grow used to me and to begin

all over again?

 

I knew the various expressions of my sweet girl’s face so well, and

it was such an honest face in its loveliness, that I was sure

beforehand she could not hide that first look from me. And I

considered whether, if it should signify any one of these meanings,

which was so very likely, could I quite answer for myself?

 

Well, I thought I could. After last night, I thought I could. But

to wait and wait, and expect and expect, and think and think, was

such bad preparation that I resolved to go along the road again and

meet her.

 

So I said to Charley, “Charley, I will go by myself and walk along

the road until she comes.” Charley highly approving of anything

that pleased me, I went and left her at home.

 

But before I got to the second milestone, I had been in so many

palpitations from seeing dust in the distance (though I knew it was

not, and could not, be the coach yet) that I resolved to turn back

and go home again. And when I had turned, I was in such fear of

the coach coming up behind me (though I still knew that it neither

would, nor could, do any such thing) that I ran the greater part of

the way to avoid being overtaken.

 

Then, I considered,