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Read books online » Fiction » Bleak House by Charles Dickens (the top 100 crime novels of all time .txt) 📖

Book online «Bleak House by Charles Dickens (the top 100 crime novels of all time .txt) 📖». Author Charles Dickens



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tea

at a very decent house of entertainment. Now, near that house of

entertainment there’s a piece of water. At tea, my prisoner got up

to fetch her pocket handkercher from the bedroom where the bonnets

was; she was rather a long time gone and came back a little out of

wind. As soon as they came home this was reported to me by Mrs.

Bucket, along with her observations and suspicions. I had the

piece of water dragged by moonlight, in presence of a couple of our

men, and the pocket pistol was brought up before it had been there

half-a-dozen hours. Now, my dear, put your arm a little further

through mine, and hold it steady, and I shan’t hurt you!”

 

In a trice Mr. Bucket snaps a handcuff on her wrist. “That’s one,”

says Mr. Bucket. “Now the other, darling. Two, and all told!”

 

He rises; she rises too. “Where,” she asks him, darkening her

large eyes until their drooping lids almost conceal them—and yet

they stare, “where is your false, your treacherous, and cursed

wife?”

 

“She’s gone forrard to the Police Office,” returns Mr. Bucket.

“You’ll see her there, my dear.”

 

“I would like to kiss her!” exclaims Mademoiselle Hortense, panting

tigress-like.

 

“You’d bite her, I suspect,” says Mr. Bucket.

 

“I would!” making her eyes very large. “I would love to tear her

limb from limb.”

 

“Bless you, darling,” says Mr. Bucket with the greatest composure,

“I’m fully prepared to hear that. Your sex have such a surprising

animosity against one another when you do differ. You don’t mind

me half so much, do you?”

 

“No. Though you are a devil still.”

 

“Angel and devil by turns, eh?” cries Mr. Bucket. “But I am in my

regular employment, you must consider. Let me put your shawl tidy.

I’ve been lady’s maid to a good many before now. Anything wanting

to the bonnet? There’s a cab at the door.”

 

Mademoiselle Hortense, casting an indignant eye at the glass,

shakes herself perfectly neat in one shake and looks, to do her

justice, uncommonly genteel.

 

“Listen then, my angel,” says she after several sarcastic nods.

“You are very spiritual. But can you restore him back to life?”

 

Mr. Bucket answers, “Not exactly.”

 

“That is droll. Listen yet one time. You are very spiritual. Can

you make a honourable lady of her?”

 

“Don’t be so malicious,” says Mr. Bucket.

 

“Or a haughty gentleman of HIM?” cries mademoiselle, referring to

Sir Leicester with ineffable disdain. “Eh! Oh, then regard him!

The poor infant! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

 

“Come, come, why this is worse PARLAYING than the other,” says Mr.

Bucket. “Come along!”

 

“You cannot do these things? Then you can do as you please with

me. It is but the death, it is all the same. Let us go, my angel.

Adieu, you old man, grey. I pity you, and I despise you!”

 

With these last words she snaps her teeth together as if her mouth

closed with a spring. It is impossible to describe how Mr. Bucket

gets her out, but he accomplishes that feat in a manner so peculiar

to himself, enfolding and pervading her like a cloud, and hovering

away with her as if he were a homely Jupiter and she the object of

his affections.

 

Sir Leicester, left alone, remains in the same attitude, as though

he were still listening and his attention were still occupied. At

length he gazes round the empty room, and finding it deserted,

rises unsteadily to his feet, pushes back his chair, and walks a

few steps, supporting himself by the table. Then he stops, and

with more of those inarticulate sounds, lifts up his eyes and seems

to stare at something.

 

Heaven knows what he sees. The green, green woods of Chesney Wold,

the noble house, the pictures of his forefathers, strangers

defacing them, officers of police coarsely handling his most

precious heirlooms, thousands of fingers pointing at him, thousands

of faces sneering at him. But if such shadows flit before him to

his bewilderment, there is one other shadow which he can name with

something like distinctness even yet and to which alone he

addresses his tearing of his white hair and his extended arms.

 

It is she in association with whom, saving that she has been for

years a main fibre of the root of his dignity and pride, he has

never had a selfish thought. It is she whom he has loved, admired,

honoured, and set up for the world to respect. It is she who, at

the core of all the constrained formalities and conventionalities

of his life, has been a stock of living tenderness and love,

susceptible as nothing else is of being struck with the agony he

feels. He sees her, almost to the exclusion of himself, and cannot

bear to look upon her cast down from the high place she has graced

so well.

 

And even to the point of his sinking on the ground, oblivious of

his suffering, he can yet pronounce her name with something like

distinctness in the midst of those intrusive sounds, and in a tone

of mourning and compassion rather than reproach.

CHAPTER LV

Flight

 

Inspector Bucket of the Detective has not yet struck his great

blow, as just now chronicled, but is yet refreshing himself with

sleep preparatory to his field-day, when through the night and

along the freezing wintry roads a chaise and pair comes out of

Lincolnshire, making its way towards London.

 

Railroads shall soon traverse all this country, and with a rattle

and a glare the engine and train shall shoot like a meteor over the

wide night-landscape, turning the moon paler; but as yet such

things are non-existent in these parts, though not wholly

unexpected. Preparations are afoot, measurements are made, ground

is staked out. Bridges are begun, and their not yet united piers

desolately look at one another over roads and streams like brick

and mortar couples with an obstacle to their union; fragments of

embankments are thrown up and left as precipices with torrents of

rusty carts and barrows tumbling over them; tripods of tall poles

appear on hilltops, where there are rumours of tunnels; everything

looks chaotic and abandoned in full hopelessness. Along the

freezing roads, and through the night, the post-chaise makes its

way without a railroad on its mind.

 

Mrs. Rouncewell, so many years housekeeper at Chesney Wold, sits

within the chaise; and by her side sits Mrs. Bagnet with her grey

cloak and umbrella. The old girl would prefer the bar in front, as

being exposed to the weather and a primitive sort of perch more in

accordance with her usual course of travelling, but Mrs. Rouncewell

is too thoughtful of her comfort to admit of her proposing it. The

old lady cannot make enough of the old girl. She sits, in her

stately manner, holding her hand, and regardless of its roughness,

puts it often to her lips. “You are a mother, my dear soul,” says

she many times, “and you found out my George’s mother!”

 

“Why, George,” returns Mrs. Bagnet, “was always free with me,

ma’am, and when he said at our house to my Woolwich that of all the

things my Woolwich could have to think of when he grew to be a man,

the comfortablest would be that he had never brought a sorrowful

line into his mother’s face or turned a hair of her head grey, then

I felt sure, from his way, that something fresh had brought his own

mother into his mind. I had often known him say to me, in past

times, that he had behaved bad to her.”

 

“Never, my dear!” returns Mrs. Rouncewell, bursting into tears.

“My blessing on him, never! He was always fond of me, and loving

to me, was my George! But he had a bold spirit, and he ran a

little wild and went for a soldier. And I know he waited at first,

in letting us know about himself, till he should rise to be an

officer; and when he didn’t rise, I know he considered himself

beneath us, and wouldn’t be a disgrace to us. For he had a lion

heart, had my George, always from a baby!”

 

The old lady’s hands stray about her as of yore, while she recalls,

all in a tremble, what a likely lad, what a fine lad, what a gay

good-humoured clever lad he was; how they all took to him down at

Chesney Wold; how Sir Leicester took to him when he was a young

gentleman; how the dogs took to him; how even the people who had

been angry with him forgave him the moment he was gone, poor boy.

And now to see him after all, and in a prison too! And the broad

stomacher heaves, and the quaint upright old-fashioned figure bends

under its load of affectionate distress.

 

Mrs. Bagnet, with the instinctive skill of a good warm heart,

leaves the old housekeeper to her emotions for a little while—not

without passing the back of her hand across her own motherly eyes—

and presently chirps up in her cheery manner, “So I says to George

when I goes to call him in to tea (he pretended to be smoking his

pipe outside), ‘What ails you this afternoon, George, for gracious

sake? I have seen all sorts, and I have seen you pretty often in

season and out of season, abroad and at home, and I never see you

so melancholy penitent.’ ‘Why, Mrs. Bagnet,’ says George, ‘it’s

because I AM melancholy and penitent both, this afternoon, that you

see me so.’ ‘What have you done, old fellow?’ I says. ‘Why, Mrs.

Bagnet,’ says George, shaking his head, ‘what I have done has been

done this many a long year, and is best not tried to be undone now.

If I ever get to heaven it won’t be for being a good son to a

widowed mother; I say no more.’ Now, ma’am, when George says to me

that it’s best not tried to be undone now, I have my thoughts as I

have often had before, and I draw it out of George how he comes to

have such things on him that afternoon. Then George tells me that

he has seen by chance, at the lawyer’s office, a fine old lady that

has brought his mother plain before him, and he runs on about that

old lady till he quite forgets himself and paints her picture to me

as she used to be, years upon years back. So I says to George when

he has done, who is this old lady he has seen? And George tells me

it’s Mrs. Rouncewell, housekeeper for more than half a century to

the Dedlock family down at Chesney Wold in Lincolnshire. George

has frequently told me before that he’s a Lincolnshire man, and I

says to my old Lignum that night, ‘Lignum, that’s his mother for

five and for-ty pound!’”

 

All this Mrs. Bagnet now relates for the twentieth time at least

within the last four hours. Trilling it out like a kind of bird,

with a pretty high note, that it may be audible to the old lady

above the hum of the wheels.

 

“Bless you, and thank you,” says Mrs. Rouncewell. “Bless you, and

thank you, my worthy soul!”

 

“Dear heart!” cries Mrs. Bagnet in the most natural manner. “No

thanks to me, I am sure. Thanks to yourself, ma’am, for being so

ready to pay ‘em! And mind once more, ma’am, what you had best do

on finding George to be your own son is to make him—for your sake

—have every sort of help to put himself in the right and clear

himself of a charge

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