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

it was certainly the case. I observed with great regret that from

this hour he never was as free and open with Mr. Jarndyce as he had

been before. He had every reason given him to be so, but he was

not; and solely on his side, an estrangement began to arise between

them.

In the business of preparation and equipment he soon lost himself,

and even his grief at parting from Ada, who remained in

Hertfordshire while he, Mr. Jarndyce, and I went up to London for a

week. He remembered her by fits and starts, even with bursts of

tears, and at such times would confide to me the heaviest self-reproaches. But in a few minutes he would recklessly conjure up

some undefinable means by which they were both to be made rich and

happy for ever, and would become as gay as possible.

It was a busy time, and I trotted about with him all day long,

buying a variety of things of which he stood in need. Of the

things he would have bought if he had been left to his own ways I

say nothing. He was perfectly confidential with me, and often

talked so sensibly and feelingly about his faults and his vigorous

resolutions, and dwelt so much upon the encouragement he derived

from these conversations that I could never have been tired if I

had tried.

There used, in that week, to come backward and forward to our

lodging to fence with Richard a person who had formerly been a

cavalry soldier; he was a fine bluff-looking man, of a frank free

bearing, with whom Richard had practised for some months. I heard

so much about him, not only from Richard, but from my guardian too,

that I was purposely in the room with my work one morning after

breakfast when he came.

“Good morning, Mr. George,” said my guardian, who happened to be

alone with me. “Mr. Carstone will be here directly. Meanwhile,

Miss Summerson is very happy to see you, I know. Sit down.”

He sat down, a little disconcerted by my presence, I thought, and

without looking at me, drew his heavy sunburnt hand across and

across his upper lip.

“You are as punctual as the sun,” said Mr. Jarndyce.

“Military time, sir,” he replied. “Force of habit. A mere habit

in me, sir. I am not at all business-like.”

“Yet you have a large establishment, too, I am told?” said Mr.

Jarndyce.

“Not much of a one, sir. I keep a shooting gallery, but not much

of a one.”

“And what kind of a shot and what kind of a swordsman do you make

of Mr. Carstone?” said my guardian.

“Pretty good, sir,” he replied, folding his arms upon his broad

chest and looking very large. “If Mr. Carstone was to give his

full mind to it, he would come out very good.”

“But he don’t, I suppose?” said my guardian.

“He did at first, sir, but not afterwards. Not his full mind.

Perhaps he has something else upon it—some young lady, perhaps.”

His bright dark eyes glanced at me for the first time.

“He has not me upon his mind, I assure you, Mr. George,” said I,

laughing, “though you seem to suspect me.”

He reddened a little through his brown and made me a trooper’s bow.

“No offence, I hope, miss. I am one of the roughs.”

“Not at all,” said I. “I take it as a compliment.”

If he had not looked at me before, he looked at me now in three or

four quick successive glances. “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said

to my guardian with a manly kind of diffidence, “but you did me the

honour to mention the young lady’s name—”

“Miss Summerson.”

“Miss Summerson,” he repeated, and looked at me again.

“Do you know the name?” I asked.

“No, miss. To my knowledge I never heard it. I thought I had seen

you somewhere.”

“I think not,” I returned, raising my head from my work to look at

him; and there was something so genuine in his speech and manner

that I was glad of the opportunity. “I remember faces very well.”

“So do I, miss!” he returned, meeting my look with the fullness of

his dark eyes and broad forehead. “Humph! What set me off, now,

upon that!”

His once more reddening through his brown and being disconcerted by

his efforts to remember the association brought my guardian to his

relief.

“Have you many pupils, Mr. George?”

“They vary in their number, sir. Mostly they’re but a small lot to

live by.”

“And what classes of chance people come to practise at your

gallery?”

“All sorts, sir. Natives and foreigners. From gentlemen to

‘prentices. I have had Frenchwomen come, before now, and show

themselves dabs at pistol-shooting. Mad people out of number, of

course, but THEY go everywhere where the doors stand open.”

“People don’t come with grudges and schemes of finishing their

practice with live targets, I hope?” said my guardian, smiling.

“Not much of that, sir, though that HAS happened. Mostly they come

for skill—or idleness. Six of one, and half-a-dozen of the other.

I beg your pardon,” said Mr. George, sitting stiffly upright and

squaring an elbow on each knee, “but I believe you’re a Chancery

suitor, if I have heard correct?”

“I am sorry to say I am.”

“I have had one of YOUR compatriots in my time, sir.”

“A Chancery suitor?” returned my guardian. “How was that?”

“Why, the man was so badgered and worried and tortured by being

knocked about from post to pillar, and from pillar to post,” said

Mr. George, “that he got out of sorts. I don’t believe he had any

idea of taking aim at anybody, but he was in that condition of

resentment and violence that he would come and pay for fifty shots

and fire away till he was red hot. One day I said to him when

there was nobody by and he had been talking to me angrily about his

wrongs, ‘If this practice is a safety-valve, comrade, well and

good; but I don’t altogether like your being so bent upon it in

your present state of mind; I’d rather you took to something else.’

I was on my guard for a blow, he was that passionate; but he

received it in very good part and left off directly. We shook

hands and struck up a sort of friendship.”

“What was that man?” asked my guardian in a new tone of interest.

“Why, he began by being a small Shropshire farmer before they made

a baited bull of him,” said Mr. George.

“Was his name Gridley?”

“It was, sir.”

Mr. George directed another succession of quick bright glances at

me as my guardian and I exchanged a word or two of surprise at the

coincidence, and I therefore explained to him how we knew the name.

He made me another of his soldierly bows in acknowledgment of what

he called my condescension.

“I don’t know,” he said as he looked at me, “what it is that sets

me off again—but—bosh! What’s my head running against!” He

passed one of his heavy hands over his crisp dark hair as if to

sweep the broken thoughts out of his mind and sat a little forward,

with one arm akimbo and the other resting on his leg, looking in a

brown study at the ground.

“I am sorry to learn that the same state of mind has got this

Gridley into new troubles and that he is in hiding,” said my

guardian.

“So I am told, sir,” returned Mr. George, still musing and looking

on the ground. “So I am told.”

“You don’t know where?”

“No, sir,” returned the trooper, lifting up his eyes and coming out

of his reverie. “I can’t say anything about him. He will be worn

out soon, I expect. You may file a strong man’s heart away for a

good many years, but it will tell all of a sudden at last.”

Richard’s entrance stopped the conversation. Mr. George rose, made

me another of his soldierly bows, wished my guardian a good day,

and strode heavily out of the room.

This was the morning of the day appointed for Richard’s departure.

We had no more purchases to make now; I had completed all his

packing early in the afternoon; and our time was disengaged until

night, when he was to go to Liverpool for Holyhead. Jarndyce and

Jarndyce being again expected to come on that day, Richard proposed

to me that we should go down to the court and hear what passed. As

it was his last day, and he was eager to go, and I had never been

there, I gave my consent and we walked down to Westminster, where

the court was then sitting. We beguiled the way with arrangements

concerning the letters that Richard was to write to me and the

letters that I was to write to him and with a great many hopeful

projects. My guardian knew where we were going and therefore was

not with us.

When we came to the court, there was the Lord Chancellor—the same

whom I had seen in his private room in Lincoln’s Inn—sitting in

great state and gravity on the bench, with the mace and seals on a

red table below him and an immense flat nosegay, like a little

garden, which scented the whole court. Below the table, again, was

a long row of solicitors, with bundles of papers on the matting at

their feet; and then there were the gentlemen of the bar in wigs

and gowns—some awake and some asleep, and one talking, and nobody

paying much attention to what he said. The Lord Chancellor leaned

back in his very easy chair with his elbow on the cushioned arm and

his forehead resting on his hand; some of those who were present

dozed; some read the newspapers; some walked about or whispered in

groups: all seemed perfectly at their ease, by no means in a hurry,

very unconcerned, and extremely comfortable.

To see everything going on so smoothly and to think of the

roughness of the suitors’ lives and deaths; to see all that full

dress and ceremony and to think of the waste, and want, and

beggared misery it represented; to consider that while the sickness

of hope deferred was raging in so many hearts this polite show went

calmly on from day to day, and year to year, in such good order and

composure; to behold the Lord Chancellor and the whole array of

practitioners under him looking at one another and at the

spectators as if nobody had ever heard that all over England the

name in which they were assembled was a bitter jest, was held in

universal horror, contempt, and indignation, was known for

something so flagrant and bad that little short of a miracle could

bring any good out of it to any one—this was so curious and self-contradictory to me, who had no experience of it, that it was at

first incredible, and I could not comprehend it. I sat where

Richard put me, and tried to listen, and looked about me; but there

seemed to be no reality in the whole scene except poor little Miss

Flite, the madwoman, standing on a bench and nodding at it.

Miss Flite soon espied us and came to where we sat. She gave me a

gracious welcome to her domain and indicated, with much

gratification and pride, its principal attractions. Mr. Kenge also

came to speak to