Bleak House Charles Dickens (classic books to read .TXT) 📖

he were to make a discovery to the contrary, he would be simply stunned⁠—would never recover himself, most likely, except to gasp and die. But he is an excellent master still, holding it a part of his state to be so. He has a great liking for Mrs. Rouncewell; he says she is a most respectable, creditable woman. He always shakes hands with her when he comes down to Chesney Wold and when he goes away; and if he were very ill, or if he were knocked down by accident, or run over, or placed in any situation expressive of a Dedlock at a disadvantage, he would say if he could speak, “Leave me, and send Mrs. Rouncewell here!” feeling his dignity, at such a pass, safer with her than with anybody else.

Mrs. Rouncewell has known trouble. She has had two sons, of whom the younger ran wild, and went for a soldier, and never came back. Even to this hour, Mrs. Rouncewell’s calm hands lose their composure when she speaks of him, and unfolding themselves from her stomacher, hover about her in an agitated manner as she says what a likely lad, what a fine lad, what a gay, good-humoured, clever lad he was! Her second son would have been provided for at Chesney Wold and would have been made steward in due season, but he took, when he was a schoolboy, to constructing steam-engines out of saucepans and setting birds to draw their own water with the least possible amount of labour, so assisting them with artful contrivance of hydraulic pressure that a thirsty canary had only, in a literal sense, to put his shoulder to the wheel and the job was done. This propensity gave Mrs. Rouncewell great uneasiness. She felt it with a mother’s anguish to be a move in the Wat Tyler direction, well knowing that Sir Leicester had that general impression of an aptitude for any art to which smoke and a tall chimney might be considered essential. But the doomed young rebel (otherwise a mild youth, and very persevering), showing no sign of grace as he got older but, on the contrary, constructing a model of a power-loom, she was fain, with many tears, to mention his backslidings to the baronet. “Mrs. Rouncewell,” said Sir Leicester, “I can never consent to argue, as you know, with anyone on any subject. You had better get rid of your boy; you had better get him into some Works. The iron country farther north is, I suppose, the congenial direction for a boy with these tendencies.” Farther north he went, and farther north he grew up; and if Sir Leicester Dedlock ever saw him when he came to Chesney Wold to visit his mother, or ever thought of him afterwards, it is certain that he only regarded him as one of a body of some odd thousand conspirators, swarthy and grim, who were in the habit of turning out by torchlight two or three nights in the week for unlawful purposes.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Rouncewell’s son has, in the course of nature and art, grown up, and established himself, and married, and called unto him Mrs. Rouncewell’s grandson, who, being out of his apprenticeship, and home from a journey in far countries, whither he was sent to enlarge his knowledge and complete his preparations for the venture of this life, stands leaning against the chimneypiece this very day in Mrs. Rouncewell’s room at Chesney Wold.

“And, again and again, I am glad to see you, Watt! And, once again, I am glad to see you, Watt!” says Mrs. Rouncewell. “You are a fine young fellow. You are like your poor uncle George. Ah!” Mrs. Rouncewell’s hands unquiet, as usual, on this reference.

“They say I am like my father, grandmother.”

“Like him, also, my dear⁠—but most like your poor uncle George! And your dear father.” Mrs. Rouncewell folds her hands again. “He is well?”

“Thriving, grandmother, in every way.”

“I am thankful!” Mrs. Rouncewell is fond of her son but has a plaintive feeling towards him, much as if he were a very honourable soldier who had gone over to the enemy.

“He is quite happy?” says she.

“Quite.”

“I am thankful! So he has brought you up to follow in his ways and has sent you into foreign countries and the like? Well, he knows best. There may be a world beyond Chesney Wold that I don’t understand. Though I am not young, either. And I have seen a quantity of good company too!”

“Grandmother,” says the young man, changing the subject, “what a very pretty girl that was I found with you just now. You called her Rosa?”

“Yes, child. She is daughter of a widow in the village. Maids are so hard to teach, nowadays, that I have put her about me young. She’s an apt scholar and will do well. She shows the house already, very pretty. She lives with me at my table here.”

“I hope I have not driven her away?”

“She supposes we have family affairs to speak about, I dare say. She is very modest. It is a fine quality in a young woman. And scarcer,” says Mrs. Rouncewell, expanding her stomacher to its utmost limits, “than it formerly was!”

The young man inclines his head in acknowledgment of the precepts of experience. Mrs. Rouncewell listens.

“Wheels!” says she. They have long been audible to the younger ears of her companion. “What wheels on such a day as this, for gracious sake?”

After a short interval, a tap at the door. “Come in!” A dark-eyed, dark-haired, shy, village beauty comes in⁠—so fresh in her rosy and yet delicate bloom that the drops of rain which have beaten on her hair look like the dew upon a flower fresh gathered.

“What company is this, Rosa?” says Mrs. Rouncewell.

“It’s two young men in a gig, ma’am, who want to see the house⁠—yes, and if you please, I told them so!” in quick reply to a gesture of dissent from the housekeeper. “I went to the hall-door and told them it was the wrong day and the wrong hour, but the young man who was