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

“Very. What did he do it for?”

“What does he do anything for? HE don’t know. Said to-day was his

birthday and he’d hand ‘em over to-night at twelve o’clock. He’ll

have drunk himself blind by that time. He has been at it all day.”

“He hasn’t forgotten the appointment, I hope?”

“Forgotten? Trust him for that. He never forgets anything. I saw

him to-night, about eight—helped him to shut up his shop—and he

had got the letters then in his hairy cap. He pulled it off and

showed ‘em me. When the shop was closed, he took them out of his

cap, hung his cap on the chair-back, and stood turning them over

before the fire. I heard him a little while afterwards, through

the floor here, humming like the wind, the only song he knows—

about Bibo, and old Charon, and Bibo being drunk when he died, or

something or other. He has been as quiet since as an old rat

asleep in his hole.”

“And you are to go down at twelve?”

“At twelve. And as I tell you, when you came it seemed to me a

hundred.”

“Tony,” says Mr. Guppy after considering a little with his legs

crossed, “he can’t read yet, can he?”

“Read! He’ll never read. He can make all the letters separately,

and he knows most of them separately when he sees them; he has got

on that much, under me; but he can’t put them together. He’s too

old to acquire the knack of it now—and too drunk.”

“Tony,” says Mr. Guppy, uncrossing and recrossing his legs, “how do

you suppose he spelt out that name of Hawdon?”

“He never spelt it out. You know what a curious power of eye he

has and how he has been used to employ himself in copying things by

eye alone. He imitated it, evidently from the direction of a

letter, and asked me what it meant.”

“Tony,” says Mr. Guppy, uncrossing and recrossing his legs again,

“should you say that the original was a man’s writing or a

woman’s?”

“A woman’s. Fifty to one a lady’s—slopes a good deal, and the end

of the letter ‘n,’ long and hasty.”

Mr. Guppy has been biting his thumb-nail during this dialogue,

generally changing the thumb when he has changed the cross leg. As

he is going to do so again, he happens to look at his coat-sleeve.

It takes his attention. He stares at it, aghast.

“Why, Tony, what on earth is going on in this house to-night? Is

there a chimney on fire?”

“Chimney on fire!”

“Ah!” returns Mr. Guppy. “See how the soot’s falling. See here,

on my arm! See again, on the table here! Confound the stuff, it

won’t blow off—smears like black fat!”

They look at one another, and Tony goes listening to the door, and

a little way upstairs, and a little way downstairs. Comes back and

says it’s all right and all quiet, and quotes the remark he lately

made to Mr. Snagsby about their cooking chops at the Sol’s Arms.

“And it was then,” resumes Mr. Guppy, still glancing with

remarkable aversion at the coat-sleeve, as they pursue their

conversation before the fire, leaning on opposite sides of the

table, with their heads very near together, “that he told you of

his having taken the bundle of letters from his lodger’s

portmanteau?”

“That was the time, sir,” answers Tony, faintly adjusting his

whiskers. “Whereupon I wrote a line to my dear boy, the Honourable

William Guppy, informing him of the appointment for to-night and

advising him not to call before, Boguey being a slyboots.”

The light vivacious tone of fashionable life which is usually

assumed by Mr. Weevle sits so ill upon him to-night that he

abandons that and his whiskers together, and after looking over his

shoulder, appears to yield himself up a prey to the horrors again.

“You are to bring the letters to your room to read and compare, and

to get yourself into a position to tell him all about them. That’s

the arrangement, isn’t it, Tony?” asks Mr. Guppy, anxiously biting

his thumb-nail.

“You can’t speak too low. Yes. That’s what he and I agreed.”

“I tell you what, Tony—”

“You can’t speak too low,” says Tony once more. Mr. Guppy nods his

sagacious head, advances it yet closer, and drops into a whisper.

“I tell you what. The first thing to be done is to make another

packet like the real one so that if he should ask to see the real

one while it’s in my possession, you can show him the dummy.”

“And suppose he detects the dummy as soon as he sees it, which with

his biting screw of an eye is about five hundred times more likely

than not,” suggests Tony.

“Then we’ll face it out. They don’t belong to him, and they never

did. You found that, and you placed them in my hands—a legal

friend of yours—for security. If he forces us to it, they’ll be

producible, won’t they?”

“Ye-es,” is Mr. Weevle’s reluctant admission.

“Why, Tony,” remonstrates his friend, “how you look! You don’t

doubt William Guppy? You don’t suspect any harm?”

“I don’t suspect anything more than I know, William,” returns the

other gravely.

“And what do you know?” urges Mr. Guppy, raising his voice a

little; but on his friend’s once more warning him, “I tell you, you

can’t speak too low,” he repeats his question without any sound at

all, forming with his lips only the words, “What do you know?”

“I know three things. First, I know that here we are whispering in

secrecy, a pair of conspirators.”

“Well!” says Mr. Guppy. “And we had better be that than a pair of

noodles, which we should be if we were doing anything else, for

it’s the only way of doing what we want to do. Secondly?”

“Secondly, it’s not made out to me how it’s likely to be

profitable, after all.”

Mr. Guppy casts up his eyes at the portrait of Lady Dedlock over

the mantelshelf and replies, “Tony, you are asked to leave that to

the honour of your friend. Besides its being calculated to serve

that friend in those chords of the human mind which—which need not

be called into agonizing vibration on the present occasion—your

friend is no fool. What’s that?”

“It’s eleven o’clock striking by the bell of Saint Paul’s. Listen

and you’ll hear all the bells in the city jangling.”

Both sit silent, listening to the metal voices, near and distant,

resounding from towers of various heights, in tones more various

than their situations. When these at length cease, all seems more

mysterious and quiet than before. One disagreeable result of

whispering is that it seems to evoke an atmosphere of silence,

haunted by the ghosts of sound—strange cracks and tickings, the

rustling of garments that have no substance in them, and the tread

of dreadful feet that would leave no mark on the sea-sand or the

winter snow. So sensitive the two friends happen to be that the

air is full of these phantoms, and the two look over their

shoulders by one consent to see that the door is shut.

“Yes, Tony?” says Mr. Guppy, drawing nearer to the fire and biting

his unsteady thumb-nail. “You were going to say, thirdly?”

“It’s far from a pleasant thing to be plotting about a dead man in

the room where he died, especially when you happen to live in it.”

“But we are plotting nothing against him, Tony.”

“May be not, still I don’t like it. Live here by yourself and see

how YOU like it.”

“As to dead men, Tony,” proceeds Mr. Guppy, evading this proposal,

“there have been dead men in most rooms.”

“I know there have, but in most rooms you let them alone, and—and

they let you alone,” Tony answers.

The two look at each other again. Mr. Guppy makes a hurried remark

to the effect that they may be doing the deceased a service, that

he hopes so. There is an oppressive blank until Mr. Weevle, by

stirring the fire suddenly, makes Mr. Guppy start as if his heart

had been stirred instead.

“Fah! Here’s more of this hateful soot hanging about,” says he.

“Let us open the window a bit and get a mouthful of air. It’s too

close.”

He raises the sash, and they both rest on the window-sill, half in

and half out of the room. The neighbouring houses are too near to

admit of their seeing any sky without craning their necks and

looking up, but lights in frowsy windows here and there, and the

rolling of distant carriages, and the new expression that there is

of the stir of men, they find to be comfortable. Mr. Guppy,

noiselessly tapping on the window-sill, resumes his whispering in

quite a light-comedy tone.

“By the by, Tony, don’t forget old Smallweed,” meaning the younger

of that name. “I have not let him into this, you know. That

grandfather of his is too keen by half. It runs in the family.”

“I remember,” says Tony. “I am up to all that.”

“And as to Krook,” resumes Mr. Guppy. “Now, do you suppose he

really has got hold of any other papers of importance, as he has

boasted to you, since you have been such allies?”

Tony shakes his head. “I don’t know. Can’t Imagine. If we get

through this business without rousing his suspicions, I shall be

better informed, no doubt. How can I know without seeing them,

when he don’t know himself? He is always spelling out words from

them, and chalking them over the table and the shop-wall, and

asking what this is and what that is; but his whole stock from

beginning to end may easily be the waste-paper he bought it as, for

anything I can say. It’s a monomania with him to think he is

possessed of documents. He has been going to learn to read them

this last quarter of a century, I should judge, from what he tells

me.”

“How did he first come by that idea, though? That’s the question,”

Mr. Guppy suggests with one eye shut, after a little forensic

meditation. “He may have found papers in something he bought,

where papers were not supposed to be, and may have got it into his

shrewd head from the manner and place of their concealment that

they are worth something.”

“Or he may have been taken in, in some pretended bargain. Or he

may have been muddled altogether by long staring at whatever he HAS

got, and by drink, and by hanging about the Lord Chancellor’s Court

and hearing of documents for ever,” returns Mr. Weevle.

Mr. Guppy sitting on the window-sill, nodding his head and

balancing all these possibilities in his mind, continues

thoughtfully to tap it, and clasp it, and measure it with his hand,

until he hastily draws his hand away.

“What, in the devil’s name,” he says, “is this! Look at my

fingers!”

A thick, yellow liquor defiles them, which is offensive to the

touch and sight and more offensive to the smell. A stagnant,

sickening oil with some natural repulsion in it that makes them

both shudder.

“What have you been doing here? What have you been pouring out of

window?”

“I pouring out of window! Nothing, I swear! Never, since I have

been here!” cries the lodger.

And yet look here—and look here! When he brings the candle here,

from the corner of the window-sill, it slowly drips and creeps away

down the bricks, here lies