Bleak House by Charles Dickens (the top 100 crime novels of all time .txt) đź“–
- Author: Charles Dickens
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candlestick, throwing the candle in to make it burn better.
Everything was just as we had left it last night and was evidently
intended to remain so. Below-stairs the dinner-cloth had not been
taken away, but had been left ready for breakfast. Crumbs, dust,
and waste-paper were all over the house. Some pewter pots and a
milk-can hung on the area railings; the door stood open; and we met
the cook round the corner coming out of a public-house, wiping her
mouth. She mentioned, as she passed us, that she had been to see
what o’clock it was.
But before we met the cook, we met Richard, who was dancing up and
down Thavies Inn to warm his feet. He was agreeably surprised to
see us stirring so soon and said he would gladly share our walk.
So he took care of Ada, and Miss Jellyby and I went first. I may
mention that Miss Jellyby had relapsed into her sulky manner and
that I really should not have thought she liked me much unless she
had told me so.
“Where would you wish to go?” she asked.
“Anywhere, my dear,” I replied.
“Anywhere’s nowhere,” said Miss Jellyby, stopping perversely.
“Let us go somewhere at any rate,” said I.
She then walked me on very fast.
“I don’t care!” she said. “Now, you are my witness, Miss
Summerson, I say I don’t care—but if he was to come to our house
with his great, shining, lumpy forehead night after night till he
was as old as Methuselah, I wouldn’t have anything to say to him.
Such ASSES as he and Ma make of themselves!”
“My dear!” I remonstrated, in allusion to the epithet and the
vigorous emphasis Miss Jellyby set upon it. “Your duty as a child—”
“Oh! Don’t talk of duty as a child, Miss Summerson; where’s Ma’s
duty as a parent? All made over to the public and Africa, I
suppose! Then let the public and Africa show duty as a child; it’s
much more their affair than mine. You are shocked, I dare say!
Very well, so am I shocked too; so we are both shocked, and there’s
an end of it!”
She walked me on faster yet.
“But for all that, I say again, he may come, and come, and come,
and I won’t have anything to say to him. I can’t bear him. If
there’s any stuff in the world that I hate and detest, it’s the
stuff he and Ma talk. I wonder the very paving-stones opposite our
house can have the patience to stay there and be a witness of such
inconsistencies and contradictions as all that sounding nonsense,
and Ma’s management!”
I could not but understand her to refer to Mr. Quale, the young
gentleman who had appeared after dinner yesterday. I was saved the
disagreeable necessity of pursuing the subject by Richard and Ada
coming up at a round pace, laughing and asking us if we meant to
run a race. Thus interrupted, Miss Jellyby became silent and
walked moodily on at my side while I admired the long successions
and varieties of streets, the quantity of people already going to
and fro, the number of vehicles passing and repassing, the busy
preparations in the setting forth of shop windows and the sweeping
out of shops, and the extraordinary creatures in rags secretly
groping among the swept-out rubbish for pins and other refuse.
“So, cousin,” said the cheerful voice of Richard to Ada behind me.
“We are never to get out of Chancery! We have come by another way
to our place of meeting yesterday, and—by the Great Seal, here’s
the old lady again!”
Truly, there she was, immediately in front of us, curtsying, and
smiling, and saying with her yesterday’s air of patronage, “The
wards in Jarndyce! Ve-ry happy, I am sure!”
“You are out early, ma’am,” said I as she curtsied to me.
“Ye-es! I usually walk here early. Before the court sits. It’s
retired. I collect my thoughts here for the business of the day,”
said the old lady mincingly. “The business of the day requires a
great deal of thought. Chancery justice is so ve-ry difficult to
follow.”
“Who’s this, Miss Summerson?” whispered Miss Jellyby, drawing my
arm tighter through her own.
The little old lady’s hearing was remarkably quick. She answered
for herself directly.
“A suitor, my child. At your service. I have the honour to attend
court regularly. With my documents. Have I the pleasure of
addressing another of the youthful parties in Jarndyce?” said the
old lady, recovering herself, with her head on one side, from a
very low curtsy.
Richard, anxious to atone for his thoughtlessness of yesterday,
good-naturedly explained that Miss Jellyby was not connected with
the suit.
“Ha!” said the old lady. “She does not expect a judgment? She
will still grow old. But not so old. Oh, dear, no! This is the
garden of Lincoln’s Inn. I call it my garden. It is quite a bower
in the summer-time. Where the birds sing melodiously. I pass the
greater part of the long vacation here. In contemplation. You
find the long vacation exceedingly long, don’t you?”
We said yes, as she seemed to expect us to say so.
“When the leaves are falling from the trees and there are no more
flowers in bloom to make up into nosegays for the Lord Chancellor’s
court,” said the old lady, “the vacation is fulfilled and the sixth
seal, mentioned in the Revelations, again prevails. Pray come and
see my lodging. It will be a good omen for me. Youth, and hope,
and beauty are very seldom there. It is a long, long time since I
had a visit from either.”
She had taken my hand, and leading me and Miss Jellyby away,
beckoned Richard and Ada to come too. I did not know how to excuse
myself and looked to Richard for aid. As he was half amused and
half curious and all in doubt how to get rid of the old lady
without offence, she continued to lead us away, and he and Ada
continued to follow, our strange conductress informing us all the
time, with much smiling condescension, that she lived close by.
It was quite true, as it soon appeared. She lived so close by that
we had not time to have done humouring her for a few moments before
she was at home. Slipping us out at a little side gate, the old
lady stopped most unexpectedly in a narrow back street, part of
some courts and lanes immediately outside the wall of the inn, and
said, “This is my lodging. Pray walk up!”
She had stopped at a shop over which was written KROOK, RAG AND
BOTTLE WAREHOUSE. Also, in long thin letters, KROOK, DEALER IN
MARINE STORES. In one part of the window was a picture of a red
paper mill at which a cart was unloading a quantity of sacks of old
rags. In another was the inscription BONES BOUGHT. In another,
KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT. In another, OLD IRON BOUGHT. In another,
WASTE-PAPER BOUGHT. In another, LADIES’ AND GENTLEMEN’S WARDROBES
BOUGHT. Everything seemed to be bought and nothing to be sold
there. In all parts of the window were quantities of dirty
bottles—blacking bottles, medicine bottles, ginger-beer and soda-water bottles, pickle bottles, wine bottles, ink bottles; I am
reminded by mentioning the latter that the shop had in several
little particulars the air of being in a legal neighbourhood and of
being, as it were, a dirty hanger-on and disowned relation of the
law. There were a great many ink bottles. There was a little
tottering bench of shabby old volumes outside the door, labelled
“Law Books, all at 9d.” Some of the inscriptions I have enumerated
were written in law-hand, like the papers I had seen in Kenge and
Carboy’s office and the letters I had so long received from the
firm. Among them was one, in the same writing, having nothing to
do with the business of the shop, but announcing that a respectable
man aged forty-five wanted engrossing or copying to execute with
neatness and dispatch: Address to Nemo, care of Mr. Krook, within.
There were several second-hand bags, blue and red, hanging up. A
little way within the shop-door lay heaps of old crackled parchment
scrolls and discoloured and dog’s-eared law-papers. I could have
fancied that all the rusty keys, of which there must have been
hundreds huddled together as old iron, had once belonged to doors
of rooms or strong chests in lawyers’ offices. The litter of rags
tumbled partly into and partly out of a one-legged wooden scale,
hanging without any counterpoise from a beam, might have been
counsellors’ bands and gowns torn up. One had only to fancy, as
Richard whispered to Ada and me while we all stood looking in, that
yonder bones in a corner, piled together and picked very clean,
were the bones of clients, to make the picture complete.
As it was still foggy and dark, and as the shop was blinded besides
by the wall of Lincoln’s Inn, intercepting the light within a
couple of yards, we should not have seen so much but for a lighted
lantern that an old man in spectacles and a hairy cap was carrying
about in the shop. Turning towards the door, he now caught sight
of us. He was short, cadaverous, and withered, with his head sunk
sideways between his shoulders and the breath issuing in visible
smoke from his mouth as if he were on fire within. His throat,
chin, and eyebrows were so frosted with white hairs and so gnarled
with veins and puckered skin that he looked from his breast upward
like some old root in a fall of snow.
“Hi, hi!” said the old man, coming to the door. “Have you anything
to sell?”
We naturally drew back and glanced at our conductress, who had been
trying to open the house-door with a key she had taken from her
pocket, and to whom Richard now said that as we had had the
pleasure of seeing where she lived, we would leave her, being
pressed for time. But she was not to be so easily left. She
became so fantastically and pressingly earnest in her entreaties
that we would walk up and see her apartment for an instant, and was
so bent, in her harmless way, on leading me in, as part of the good
omen she desired, that I (whatever the others might do) saw nothing
for it but to comply. I suppose we were all more or less curious;
at any rate, when the old man added his persuasions to hers and
said, “Aye, aye! Please her! It won’t take a minute! Come in,
come in! Come in through the shop if t’other door’s out of order!”
we all went in, stimulated by Richard’s laughing encouragement and
relying on his protection.
“My landlord, Krook,” said the little old lady, condescending to
him from her lofty station as she presented him to us. “He is
called among the neighbours the Lord Chancellor. His shop is
called the Court of Chancery. He is a very eccentric person. He
is very odd. Oh, I assure you he is very odd!”
She shook her head a great many times and tapped her forehead with
her finger to express to us that we must have the goodness to
excuse him, “For he is a little—you know—M!” said the old lady
with great stateliness. The old man overheard, and laughed.
“It’s true enough,” he said, going before us with the lantern,
“that they call me the Lord Chancellor and call my
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