Have you ever thought about what fiction is? Probably, such a question may seem surprising: and so everything is clear. Every person throughout his life has to repeatedly create the works he needs for specific purposes - statements, autobiographies, dictations - using not gypsum or clay, not musical notes, not paints, but just a word. At the same time, almost every person will be very surprised if he is told that he thereby created a work of fiction, which is very different from visual art, music and sculpture making. However, everyone understands that a student's essay or dictation is fundamentally different from novels, short stories, news that are created by professional writers. In the works of professionals there is the most important difference - excogitation. But, oddly enough, in a school literature course, you don’t realize the full power of fiction. So using our website in your free time discover fiction for yourself. Bleak House by Charles Dickens (the top 100 crime novels of all time .txt) 📖
- Author: Charles Dickens
- Performer: 0141439726
Book online «Bleak House by Charles Dickens (the top 100 crime novels of all time .txt) 📖». Author Charles Dickens
consideration of the matter like a machine. “My experience teaches
me, Lady Dedlock, that most of the people I know would do far
better to leave marriage alone. It is at the bottom of three
fourths of their troubles. So I thought when Sir Leicester
married, and so I always have thought since. No more about that.
I must now be guided by circumstances. In the meanwhile I must beg
you to keep your own counsel, and I will keep mine.”
“I am to drag my present life on, holding its pains at your
pleasure, day by day?” she asks, still looking at the distant sky.
“Yes, I am afraid so, Lady Dedlock.”
“It is necessary, you think, that I should be so tied to the
stake?”
“I am sure that what I recommend is necessary.”
“I am to remain on this gaudy platform on which my miserable
deception has been so long acted, and it is to fall beneath me when
you give the signal?” she said slowly.
“Not without notice, Lady Dedlock. I shall take no step without
forewarning you.”
She asks all her questions as if she were repeating them from
memory or calling them over in her sleep.
“We are to meet as usual?”
“Precisely as usual, if you please.”
“And I am to hide my guilt, as I have done so many years?”
“As you have done so many years. I should not have made that
reference myself, Lady Dedlock, but I may now remind you that your
secret can be no heavier to you than it was, and is no worse and no
better than it was. I know it certainly, but I believe we have
never wholly trusted each other.”
She stands absorbed in the same frozen way for some little time
before asking, “Is there anything more to be sald to-night?”
“Why,” Mr. Tulkinghorn returns methodically as he softly rubs his
hands, “I should like to be assured of your acquiescence in my
arrangements, Lady Dedlock.”
“You may be assured of it.”
“Good. And I would wish in conclusion to remind you, as a business
precaution, in case it should be necessary to recall the fact in
any communication with Sir Leicester, that throughout our interview
I have expressly stated my sole consideration to be Sir Leicester’s
feelings and honour and the family reputation. I should have been
happy to have made Lady Dedlock a prominent consideration, too, if
the case had admitted of it; but unfortunately it does not.”
“I can attest your fidelity, sir.”
Both before and after saying it she remains absorbed, but at length
moves, and turns, unshaken in her natural and acquired presence,
towards the door. Mr. Tulkinghorn opens both the doors exactly as
he would have done yesterday, or as he would have done ten years
ago, and makes his old-fashioned bow as she passes out. It is not
an ordinary look that he receives from the handsome face as it goes
into the darkness, and it is not an ordinary movement, though a
very slight one, that acknowledges his courtesy. But as he
reflects when he is left alone, the woman has been putting no
common constraint upon herself.
He would know it all the better if he saw the woman pacing her own
rooms with her hair wildly thrown from her flung-back face, her
hands clasped behind her head, her figure twisted as if by pain.
He would think so all the more if he saw the woman thus hurrying up
and down for hours, without fatigue, without intermission, followed
by the faithful step upon the Ghost’s Walk. But he shuts out the
now chilled air, draws the window-curtain, goes to bed, and falls
asleep. And truly when the stars go out and the wan day peeps into
the turret-chamber, finding him at his oldest, he looks as if the
digger and the spade were both commissioned and would soon be
digging.
The same wan day peeps in at Sir Leicester pardoning the repentant
country in a majestically condescending dream; and at the cousins
entering on various public employments, principally receipt of
salary; and at the chaste Volumnia, bestowing a dower of fifty
thousand pounds upon a hideous old general with a mouth of false
teeth like a pianoforte too full of keys, long the admiration of
Bath and the terror of every other community. Also into rooms high
in the roof, and into offices in court-yards, and over stables,
where humbler ambition dreams of bliss, in keepers’ lodges, and in
holy matrimony with Will or Sally. Up comes the bright sun,
drawing everything up with it—the Wills and Sallys, the latent
vapour in the earth, the drooping leaves and flowers, the birds and
beasts and creeping things, the gardeners to sweep the dewy turf
and unfold emerald velvet where the roller passes, the smoke of the
great kitchen fire wreathing itself straight and high into the
lightsome air. Lastly, up comes the flag over Mr. Tulkinghorn’s
unconscious head cheerfully proclaiming that Sir Leicester and Lady
Dedlock are in their happy home and that there is hospitality at
the place in Lincolnshire.
In Mr. Tulkinghorn’s Chambers
From the verdant undulations and the spreading oaks of the Dedlock
property, Mr. Tulkinghorn transfers himself to the stale heat and
dust of London. His manner of coming and going between the two
places is one of his impenetrabilities. He walks into Chesney Wold
as if it were next door to his chambers and returns to his chambers
as if he had never been out of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He neither
changes his dress before the journey nor talks of it afterwards.
He melted out of his turret-room this morning, just as now, in the
late twilight, he melts into his own square.
Like a dingy London bird among the birds at roost in these pleasant
fields, where the sheep are all made into parchment, the goats into
wigs, and the pasture into chaff, the lawyer, smoke-dried and
faded, dwelling among mankind but not consorting with them, aged
without experience of genial youth, and so long used to make his
cramped nest in holes and corners of human nature that he has
forgotten its broader and better range, comes sauntering home. In
the oven made by the hot pavements and hot buildings, he has baked
himself dryer than usual; and he has in his thirsty mind his
mellowed port-wine half a century old.
The lamplighter is skipping up and down his ladder on Mr.
Tulkinghorn’s side of the Fields when that high-priest of noble
mysteries arrives at his own dull court-yard. He ascends the door-steps and is gliding into the dusky hall when he encounters, on the
top step, a bowing and propitiatory little man.
“Is that Snagsby?”
“Yes, sir. I hope you are well, sir. I was just giving you up,
sir, and going home.”
“Aye? What is it? What do you want with me?”
“Well, sir,” says Mr. Snagsby, holding his hat at the side of his
head in his deference towards his best customer, “I was wishful to
say a word to you, sir.”
“Can you say it here?”
“Perfectly, sir.”
“Say it then.” The lawyer turns, leans his arms on the iron
railing at the top of the steps, and looks at the lamplighter
lighting the court-yard.
“It is relating,” says Mr. Snagsby in a mysterious low voice, “it
is relating—not to put too fine a point upon it—to the foreigner,
sir!”
Mr. Tulkinghorn eyes him with some surprise. “What foreigner?”
“The foreign female, sir. French, if I don’t mistake? I am not
acquainted with that language myself, but I should judge from her
manners and appearance that she was French; anyways, certainly
foreign. Her that was upstairs, sir, when Mr. Bucket and me had
the honour of waiting upon you with the sweeping-boy that night.”
“Oh! Yes, yes. Mademoiselle Hortense.”
“Indeed, sir?” Mr. Snagsby coughs his cough of submission behind
his hat. “I am not acquainted myself with the names of foreigners
in general, but I have no doubt it WOULD be that.” Mr. Snagsby
appears to have set out in this reply with some desperate design of
repeating the name, but on reflection coughs again to excuse
himself.
“And what can you have to say, Snagsby,” demands Mr. Tulkinghorn,
“about her?”
“Well, sir,” returns the stationer, shading his communication with
his hat, “it falls a little hard upon me. My domestic happiness is
very great—at least, it’s as great as can be expected, I’m sure—
but my little woman is rather given to jealousy. Not to put too
fine a point upon it, she is very much given to jealousy. And you
see, a foreign female of that genteel appearance coming into the
shop, and hovering—I should be the last to make use of a strong
expression if I could avoid it, but hovering, sir—in the court—
you know it is—now ain’t it? I only put it to yourself, sir.”
Mr. Snagsby, having said this in a very plaintive manner, throws in
a cough of general application to fill up all the blanks.
“Why, what do you mean?” asks Mr. Tulkinghorn.
“Just so, sir,” returns Mr. Snagsby; “I was sure you would feel it
yourself and would excuse the reasonableness of MY feelings when
coupled with the known excitableness of my little woman. You see,
the foreign female—which you mentioned her name just now, with
quite a native sound I am sure—caught up the word Snagsby that
night, being uncommon quick, and made inquiry, and got the
direction and come at dinner-time. Now Guster, our young woman, is
timid and has fits, and she, taking fright at the foreigner’s
looks—which are fierce—and at a grinding manner that she has of
speaking—which is calculated to alarm a weak mind—gave way to it,
instead of bearing up against it, and tumbled down the kitchen
stairs out of one into another, such fits as I do sometimes think
are never gone into, or come out of, in any house but ours.
Consequently there was by good fortune ample occupation for my
little woman, and only me to answer the shop. When she DID say
that Mr. Tulkinghorn, being always denied to her by his employer
(which I had no doubt at the time was a foreign mode of viewing a
clerk), she would do herself the pleasure of continually calling at
my place until she was let in here. Since then she has been, as I
began by saying, hovering, hovering, sir”—Mr. Snagsby repeats the
word with pathetic emphasis—“in the court. The effects of which
movement it is impossible to calculate. I shouldn’t wonder if it
might have already given rise to the painfullest mistakes even in
the neighbours’ minds, not mentioning (if such a thing was
possible) my little woman. Whereas, goodness knows,” says Mr.
Snagsby, shaking his head, “I never had an idea of a foreign
female, except as being formerly connected with a bunch of brooms
and a baby, or at the present time with a tambourine and earrings.
I never had, I do assure you, sir!”
Mr. Tulkinghorn had listened gravely to this complaint and inquires
when the stationer has finished, “And that’s all, is it, Snagsby?”
“Why yes, sir, that’s all,” says Mr. Snagsby, ending with a cough
that plainly adds, “and it’s enough too—for me.”
“I don’t know what Mademoiselle Hortense may want or mean, unless
she is mad,” says the lawyer.
“Even if she was, you know, sir,” Mr. Snagsby pleads, “it wouldn’t
be a consolation to have some weapon or another in the form of a
foreign dagger planted in the family.”
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