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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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I mean any minor point.”

 

“Mr. Tulkinghorn,” returns Sir Leicester, “there can be no minor

point between myself and Mr. Boythorn. If I go farther, and observe

that I cannot readily conceive how ANY right of mine can be a minor

point, I speak not so much in reference to myself as an individual

as in reference to the family position I have it in charge to

maintain.”

 

Mr. Tulkinghorn inclines his head again. “I have now my

instructions,” he says. “Mr. Boythorn will give us a good deal of

trouble—”

 

“It is the character of such a mind, Mr. Tulkinghorn,” Sir Leicester

interrupts him, “TO give trouble. An exceedingly ill-conditioned,

levelling person. A person who, fifty years ago, would probably

have been tried at the Old Bailey for some demagogue proceeding, and

severely punished—if not,” adds Sir Leicester after a moment’s

pause, “if not hanged, drawn, and quartered.”

 

Sir Leicester appears to discharge his stately breast of a burden in

passing this capital sentence, as if it were the next satisfactory

thing to having the sentence executed.

 

“But night is coming on,” says he, “and my Lady will take cold. My

dear, let us go in.”

 

As they turn towards the hall-door, Lady Dedlock addresses Mr.

Tulkinghorn for the first time.

 

“You sent me a message respecting the person whose writing I

happened to inquire about. It was like you to remember the

circumstance; I had quite forgotten it. Your message reminded me of

it again. I can’t imagine what association I had with a hand like

that, but I surely had some.”

 

“You had some?” Mr. Tulkinghorn repeats.

 

“Oh, yes!” returns my Lady carelessly. “I think I must have had

some. And did you really take the trouble to find out the writer of

that actual thing—what is it!—affidavit?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“How very odd!”

 

They pass into a sombre breakfast-room on the ground floor, lighted

in the day by two deep windows. It is now twilight. The fire glows

brightly on the panelled wall and palely on the window-glass, where,

through the cold reflection of the blaze, the colder landscape

shudders in the wind and a grey mist creeps along, the only

traveller besides the waste of clouds.

 

My Lady lounges in a great chair in the chimney-corner, and Sir

Leicester takes another great chair opposite. The lawyer stands

before the fire with his hand out at arm’s length, shading his face.

He looks across his arm at my Lady.

 

“Yes,” he says, “I inquired about the man, and found him. And, what

is very strange, I found him—”

 

“Not to be any out-of-the-way person, I am afraid!” Lady Dedlock

languidly anticipates.

 

“I found him dead.”

 

“Oh, dear me!” remonstrated Sir Leicester. Not so much shocked by

the fact as by the fact of the fact being mentioned.

 

“I was directed to his lodging—a miserable, poverty-stricken place

—and I found him dead.”

 

“You will excuse me, Mr. Tulkinghorn,” observes Sir Leicester. “I

think the less said—”

 

“Pray, Sir Leicester, let me hear the story out” (it is my Lady

speaking). “It is quite a story for twilight. How very shocking!

Dead?”

 

Mr. Tulkinghorn re-asserts it by another inclination of his head.

“Whether by his own hand—”

 

“Upon my honour!” cries Sir Leicester. “Really!”

 

“Do let me hear the story!” says my Lady.

 

“Whatever you desire, my dear. But, I must say—”

 

“No, you mustn’t say! Go on, Mr. Tulkinghorn.”

 

Sir Leicester’s gallantry concedes the point, though he still feels

that to bring this sort of squalor among the upper classes is

really—really—

 

“I was about to say,” resumes the lawyer with undisturbed calmness,

“that whether he had died by his own hand or not, it was beyond my

power to tell you. I should amend that phrase, however, by saying

that he had unquestionably died of his own act, though whether by

his own deliberate intention or by mischance can never certainly be

known. The coroner’s jury found that he took the poison

accidentally.”

 

“And what kind of man,” my Lady asks, “was this deplorable

creature?”

 

“Very difficult to say,” returns the lawyer, shaking his head. “He

had lived so wretchedly and was so neglected, with his gipsy colour

and his wild black hair and beard, that I should have considered him

the commonest of the common. The surgeon had a notion that he had

once been something better, both in appearance and condition.”

 

“What did they call the wretched being?”

 

“They called him what he had called himself, but no one knew his

name.”

 

“Not even any one who had attended on him?”

 

“No one had attended on him. He was found dead. In fact, I found

him.”

 

“Without any clue to anything more?”

 

“Without any; there was,” says the lawyer meditatively, “an old

portmanteau, but—No, there were no papers.”

 

During the utterance of every word of this short dialogue, Lady

Dedlock and Mr. Tulkinghorn, without any other alteration in their

customary deportment, have looked very steadily at one another—as

was natural, perhaps, in the discussion of so unusual a subject.

Sir Leicester has looked at the fire, with the general expression of

the Dedlock on the staircase. The story being told, he renews his

stately protest, saying that as it is quite clear that no

association in my Lady’s mind can possibly be traceable to this poor

wretch (unless he was a begging-letter writer), he trusts to hear no

more about a subject so far removed from my Lady’s station.

 

“Certainly, a collection of horrors,” says my Lady, gathering up her

mantles and furs, “but they interest one for the moment! Have the

kindness, Mr. Tulkinghorn, to open the door for me.”

 

Mr. Tulkinghorn does so with deference and holds it open while she

passes out. She passes close to him, with her usual fatigued manner

and insolent grace. They meet again at dinner—again, next day—

again, for many days in succession. Lady Dedlock is always the same

exhausted deity, surrounded by worshippers, and terribly liable to

be bored to death, even while presiding at her own shrine. Mr.

Tulkinghorn is always the same speechless repository of noble

confidences, so oddly but of place and yet so perfectly at home.

They appear to take as little note of one another as any two people

enclosed within the same walls could. But whether each evermore

watches and suspects the other, evermore mistrustful of some great

reservation; whether each is evermore prepared at all points for the

other, and never to be taken unawares; what each would give to know

how much the other knows—all this is hidden, for the time, in their

own hearts.

CHAPTER XIII

Esther’s Narrative

 

We held many consultations about what Richard was to be, first

without Mr. Jarndyce, as he had requested, and afterwards with him,

but it was a long time before we seemed to make progress. Richard

said he was ready for anything. When Mr. Jarndyce doubted whether

he might not already be too old to enter the Navy, Richard said he

had thought of that, and perhaps he was. When Mr. Jarndyce asked

him what he thought of the Army, Richard said he had thought of

that, too, and it wasn’t a bad idea. When Mr. Jarndyce advised him

to try and decide within himself whether his old preference for the

sea was an ordinary boyish inclination or a strong impulse, Richard

answered, Well he really HAD tried very often, and he couldn’t make

out.

 

“How much of this indecision of character,” Mr. Jarndyce said to me,

“is chargeable on that incomprehensible heap of uncertainty and

procrastination on which he has been thrown from his birth, I don’t

pretend to say; but that Chancery, among its other sins, is

responsible for some of it, I can plainly see. It has engendered or

confirmed in him a habit of putting off—and trusting to this, that,

and the other chance, without knowing what chance—and dismissing

everything as unsettled, uncertain, and confused. The character of

much older and steadier people may be even changed by the

circumstances surrounding them. It would be too much to expect that

a boy’s, in its formation, should be the subject of such influences

and escape them.”

 

I felt this to be true; though if I may venture to mention what I

thought besides, I thought it much to be regretted that Richard’s

education had not counteracted those influences or directed his

character. He had been eight years at a public school and had

learnt, I understood, to make Latin verses of several sorts in the

most admirable manner. But I never heard that it had been anybody’s

business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his

failings lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to HIM. HE had been

adapted to the verses and had learnt the art of making them to such

perfection that if he had remained at school until he was of age, I

suppose he could only have gone on making them over and over again

unless he had enlarged his education by forgetting how to do it.

Still, although I had no doubt that they were very beautiful, and

very improving, and very sufficient for a great many purposes of

life, and always remembered all through life, I did doubt whether

Richard would not have profited by some one studying him a little,

instead of his studying them quite so much.

 

To be sure, I knew nothing of the subject and do not even now know

whether the young gentlemen of classic Rome or Greece made verses to

the same extent—or whether the young gentlemen of any country ever

did.

 

“I haven’t the least idea,” said Richard, musing, “what I had better

be. Except that I am quite sure I don’t want to go into the Church,

it’s a toss-up.”

 

“You have no inclination in Mr. Kenge’s way?” suggested Mr.

Jarndyce.

 

“I don’t know that, sir!” replied Richard. “I am fond of boating.

Articled clerks go a good deal on the water. It’s a capital

profession!”

 

“Surgeon—” suggested Mr. Jarndyce.

 

“That’s the thing, sir!” cried Richard.

 

I doubt if he had ever once thought of it before.

 

“That’s the thing, sir,” repeated Richard with the greatest

enthusiasm. “We have got it at last. M.R.C.S.!”

 

He was not to be laughed out of it, though he laughed at it

heartily. He said he had chosen his profession, and the more he

thought of it, the more he felt that his destiny was clear; the art

of healing was the art of all others for him. Mistrusting that he

only came to this conclusion because, having never had much chance

of finding out for himself what he was fitted for and having never

been guided to the discovery, he was taken by the newest idea and

was glad to get rid of the trouble of consideration, I wondered

whether the Latin verses often ended in this or whether Richard’s

was a solitary case.

 

Mr. Jarndyce took great pains to talk with him seriously and to put

it to his good sense not to deceive himself in so important a

matter. Richard was a little grave after these interviews, but

invariably told Ada and me that it was all right, and then began to

talk about something else.

 

“By heaven!” cried Mr. Boythorn, who interested himself strongly in

the subject—though I need not say that, for he could do nothing

weakly; “I rejoice to find a young gentleman of spirit and gallantry

devoting himself to that noble profession! The more spirit there is

in it, the better for mankind and the worse for those mercenary

task-masters and

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