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

arrange it with the other lodgers and should not so much mind its

being liked or disliked in the yard. Mr. Gridley gave his consent

gruff—but gave it. He was always gruff with him, but he has been

kind to the children since. A person is never known till a person

is proved.”

“Have many people been kind to the children?” asked Mr. Jarndyce.

“Upon the whole, not so bad, sir,” said Mrs. Blinder; “but

certainly not so many as would have been if their father’s calling

had been different. Mr. Coavins gave a guinea, and the follerers

made up a little purse. Some neighbours in the yard that had

always joked and tapped their shoulders when he went by came

forward with a little subscription, and—in general—not so bad.

Similarly with Charlotte. Some people won’t employ her because she

was a follerer’s child; some people that do employ her cast it at

her; some make a merit of having her to work for them, with that

and all her drawbacks upon her, and perhaps pay her less and put

upon her more. But she’s patienter than others would be, and is

clever too, and always willing, up to the full mark of her strength

and over. So I should say, in general, not so bad, sir, but might

be better.”

Mrs. Blinder sat down to give herself a more favourable opportunity

of recovering her breath, exhausted anew by so much talking before

it was fully restored. Mr. Jarndyce was turning to speak to us

when his attention was attracted by the abrupt entrance into the

room of the Mr. Gridley who had been mentioned and whom we had seen

on our way up.

“I don’t know what you may be doing here, ladies and gentlemen,” he

said, as if he resented our presence, “but you’ll excuse my coming

in. I don’t come in to stare about me. Well, Charley! Well, Tom!

Well, little one! How is it with us all to-day?”

He bent over the group in a caressing way and clearly was regarded

as a friend by the children, though his face retained its stern

character and his manner to us was as rude as it could be. My

guardian noticed it and respected it.

“No one, surely, would come here to stare about him,” he said

mildly.

“May be so, sir, may be so,” returned the other, taking Tom upon

his knee and waving him off impatiently. “I don’t want to argue

with ladies and gentlemen. I have had enough of arguing to last

one man his life.”

“You have sufficient reason, I dare say,” said Mr. Jarndyce, “for

being chafed and irritated—”

“There again!” exclaimed the man, becoming violently angry. “I am

of a quarrelsome temper. I am irascible. I am not polite!”

“Not very, I think.”

“Sir,” said Gridley, putting down the child and going up to him as

if he meant to strike him, “do you know anything of Courts of

Equity?”

“Perhaps I do, to my sorrow.”

“To your sorrow?” said the man, pausing in his wrath, “if so, I

beg your pardon. I am not polite, I know. I beg your pardon!

Sir,” with renewed violence, “I have been dragged for five and

twenty years over burning iron, and I have lost the habit of

treading upon velvet. Go into the Court of Chancery yonder and ask

what is one of the standing jokes that brighten up their business

sometimes, and they will tell you that the best joke they have is

the man from Shropshire. I,” he said, beating one hand on the

other passionately, “am the man from Shropshire.”

“I believe I and my family have also had the honour of furnishing

some entertainment in the same grave place,” said my guardian

composedly. “You may have heard my name—Jarndyce.”

“Mr. Jarndyce,” said Gridley with a rough sort of salutation, “you

bear your wrongs more quietly than I can bear mine. More than

that, I tell you—and I tell this gentleman, and these young

ladies, if they are friends of yours—that if I took my wrongs in

any other way, I should be driven mad! It is only by resenting

them, and by revenging them in my mind, and by angrily demanding

the justice I never get, that I am able to keep my wits together.

It is only that!” he said, speaking in a homely, rustic way and

with great vehemence. “You may tell me that I over-excite myself.

I answer that it’s in my nature to do it, under wrong, and I must

do it. There’s nothing between doing it, and sinking into the

smiling state of the poor little mad woman that haunts the court.

If I was once to sit down under it, I should become imbecile.”

The passion and heat in which he was, and the manner in which his

face worked, and the violent gestures with which he accompanied

what he said, were most painful to see.

“Mr. Jarndyce,” he said, “consider my case. As true as there is a

heaven above us, this is my case. I am one of two brothers. My

father (a farmer) made a will and left his farm and stock and so

forth to my mother for her life. After my mother’s death, all was

to come to me except a legacy of three hundred pounds that I was

then to pay my brother. My mother died. My brother some time

afterwards claimed his legacy. I and some of my relations said

that he had had a part of it already in board and lodging and some

other things. Now mind! That was the question, and nothing else.

No one disputed the will; no one disputed anything but whether part

of that three hundred pounds had been already paid or not. To

settle that question, my brother filing a bill, I was obliged to go

into this accursed Chancery; I was forced there because the law

forced me and would let me go nowhere else. Seventeen people were

made defendants to that simple suit! It first came on after two

years. It was then stopped for another two years while the master

(may his head rot off!) inquired whether I was my father’s son,

about which there was no dispute at all with any mortal creature.

He then found out that there were not defendants enough—remember,

there were only seventeen as yet!—but that we must have another

who had been left out and must begin all over again. The costs at

that time—before the thing was begun!—were three times the

legacy. My brother would have given up the legacy, and joyful, to

escape more costs. My whole estate, left to me in that will of my

father’s, has gone in costs. The suit, still undecided, has fallen

into rack, and ruin, and despair, with everything else—and here I

stand, this day! Now, Mr. Jarndyce, in your suit there are

thousands and thousands involved, where in mine there are hundreds.

Is mine less hard to bear or is it harder to bear, when my whole

living was in it and has been thus shamefully sucked away?”

Mr. Jarndyce said that he condoled with him with all his heart and

that he set up no monopoly himself in being unjustly treated by

this monstrous system.

“There again!” said Mr. Gridley with no diminution of his rage.

“The system! I am told on all hands, it’s the system. I mustn’t

look to individuals. It’s the system. I mustn’t go into court and

say, ‘My Lord, I beg to know this from you—is this right or wrong?

Have you the face to tell me I have received justice and therefore

am dismissed?’ My Lord knows nothing of it. He sits there to

administer the system. I mustn’t go to Mr. Tulkinghorn, the

solicitor in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and say to him when he makes me

furious by being so cool and satisfied—as they all do, for I know

they gain by it while I lose, don’t I?—I mustn’t say to him, ‘I

will have something out of some one for my ruin, by fair means or

foul!’ HE is not responsible. It’s the system. But, if I do no

violence to any of them, here—I may! I don’t know what may happen

if I am carried beyond myself at last! I will accuse the

individual workers of that system against me, face to face, before

the great eternal bar!”

His passion was fearful. I could not have believed in such rage

without seeing it.

“I have done!” he said, sitting down and wiping his face. “Mr.

Jarndyce, I have done! I am violent, I know. I ought to know it.

I have been in prison for contempt of court. I have been in prison

for threatening the solicitor. I have been in this trouble, and

that trouble, and shall be again. I am the man from Shropshire,

and I sometimes go beyond amusing them, though they have found it

amusing, too, to see me committed into custody and brought up in

custody and all that. It would be better for me, they tell me, if

I restrained myself. I tell them that if I did restrain myself I

should become imbecile. I was a good-enough-tempered man once, I

believe. People in my part of the country say they remember me so,

but now I must have this vent under my sense of injury or nothing

could hold my wits together. It would be far better for you, Mr.

Gridley,’ the Lord Chancellor told me last week, ‘not to waste your

time here, and to stay, usefully employed, down in Shropshire.’

‘My Lord, my Lord, I know it would,’ said I to him, ‘and it would

have been far better for me never to have heard the name of your

high office, but unhappily for me, I can’t undo the past, and the

past drives me here!’ Besides,” he added, breaking fiercely out,

“I’ll shame them. To the last, I’ll show myself in that court to

its shame. If I knew when I was going to die, and could be carried

there, and had a voice to speak with, I would die there, saying,

‘You have brought me here and sent me from here many and many a

time. Now send me out feet foremost!’”

His countenance had, perhaps for years, become so set in its

contentious expression that it did not soften, even now when he was

quiet.

“I came to take these babies down to my room for an hour,” he said,

going to them again, “and let them play about. I didn’t mean to

say all this, but it don’t much signify. You’re not afraid of me,

Tom, are you?”

“No!” said Tom. “You ain’t angry with ME.”

“You are right, my child. You’re going back, Charley? Aye? Come

then, little one!” He took the youngest child on his arm, where

she was willing enough to be carried. “I shouldn’t wonder if we

found a ginger-bread soldier downstairs. Let’s go and look for

him!”

He made his former rough salutation, which was not deficient in a

certain respect, to Mr. Jarndyce, and bowing slightly to us, went

downstairs to his room.

Upon that, Mr. Skimpole began to talk, for the first time since our

arrival, in his usual gay strain. He said, Well, it was really

very pleasant to see how things lazily adapted themselves to

purposes. Here was this Mr. Gridley, a man of a robust will and

surprising energy—intellectually speaking, a sort of inharmonious

blacksmith—and he could easily imagine that there Gridley was,

years ago, wandering about in life for something to expend his

superfluous combativeness upon—a sort of Young