Bleak House by Charles Dickens (ebook reader that looks like a book TXT) 📕

Signs and Tokens

I don’t know how it is I seem to be always writing about myself. I

mean all the time to write about other people, and I try to think

about myself as little as possible, and I am sure, when I find

myself coming into the story again, I am really vexed and say,

“Dear, dear, you tiresome little creature, I wish you wouldn’t!”

but it is all of no use. I hope any one who may read what I write

will understand that if these pages contain a great deal about me,

I can only suppose it must be because I have really something to do

with them and can’t be kept out.

My darling and I read together, and worked, and practised, and

found so much employment for our time that the winter days flew by

us like bright-winged birds. Generally in the afternoons, and

always in the evenings, Richard gave us his company. Although he

was one of the most restless creatures in the world, he certainly

was very fond of our society.

He was very, very, very fond of Ada. I mean it, and I had better

say it at once. I had never seen any young people falling in love

before, but I found them out quite soon. I could not say so, of

course, or show that I knew anything about it. On the contrary, I

was so demure and used to seem so unconscious that sometimes I

considered within myself while I was sitting at work whether I was

not growing quite deceitful.

But there was no help for it. All I had to do was to be quiet, and

I was as quiet as a mouse. They were as quiet as mice too, so far

as any words were concerned, but the innocent manner in which they

relied more and more upon me as they took more and more to one

another was so charming that I had great difficulty in not showing

how it interested me.

“Our dear little old woman is such a capital old woman,” Richard

would say, coming up to meet me in the garden early, with his

pleasant laugh and perhaps the least tinge of a blush, “that I

can’t get on without her. Before I begin my harum-scarum day—

grinding away at those books and instruments and then galloping up

hill and down dale, all the country round, like a highwayman—it

does me so much good to come and have a steady walk with our

comfortable friend, that here I am again!”

“You know, Dame Durden, dear,” Ada would say at night, with her

head upon my shoulder and the firelight shining in her thoughtful

eyes, “I don’t want to talk when we come upstairs here. Only to

sit a little while thinking, with your dear face for company, and

to hear the wind and remember the poor sailors at sea—”

Ah! Perhaps Richard was going to be a sailor. We had talked it

over very often now, and there was some talk of gratifying the

inclination of his childhood for the sea. Mr. Jarndyce had written

to a relation of the family, a great Sir Leicester Dedlock, for his

interest in Richard’s favour, generally; and Sir Leicester had

replied in a gracious manner that he would be happy to advance the

prospects of the young gentleman if it should ever prove to be

within his power, which was not at all probable, and that my Lady

sent her compliments to the young gentleman (to whom she perfectly

remembered that she was allied by remote consanguinity) and trusted

that he would ever do his duty in any honourable profession to

which he might devote himself.

“So I apprehend it’s pretty clear,” said Richard to me, “that I

shall have to work my own way. Never mind! Plenty of people have

had to do that before now, and have done it. I only wish I had the

command of a clipping privateer to begin with and could carry off

the Chancellor and keep him on short allowance until he gave

judgment in our cause. He’d find himself growing thin, if he

didn’t look sharp!”

With a buoyancy and hopefulness and a gaiety that hardly ever

flagged, Richard had a carelessness in his character that quite

perplexed me, principally because he mistook it, in such a very odd

way, for prudence. It entered into all his calculations about

money in a singular manner which I don’t think I can better explain

than by reverting for a moment to our loan to Mr. Skimpole.

Mr. Jarndyce had ascertained the amount, either from Mr. Skimpole

himself or from Coavinses, and had placed the money in my hands

with instructions to me to retain my own part of it and hand the

rest to Richard. The number of little acts of thoughtless

expenditure which Richard justified by the recovery of his ten

pounds, and the number of times he talked to me as if he had saved

or realized that amount, would form a sum in simple addition.

“My prudent Mother Hubbard, why not?” he said to me when he wanted,

without the least consideration, to bestow five pounds on the

brickmaker. “I made ten pounds, clear, out of Coavinses’

business.”

“How was that?” said I.

“Why, I got rid of ten pounds which I was quite content to get rid

of and never expected to see any more. You don’t deny that?”

“No,” said I.

“Very well! Then I came into possession of ten pounds—”

“The same ten pounds,” I hinted.

“That has nothing to do with it!” returned Richard. “I have got

ten pounds more than I expected to have, and consequently I can

afford to spend it without being particular.”

In exactly the same way, when he was persuaded out of the sacrifice

of these five pounds by being convinced that it would do no good,

he carried that sum to his credit and drew upon it.

“Let me see!” he would say. “I saved five pounds out of the

brickmaker’s affair, so if I have a good rattle to London and back

in a post-chaise and put