Bleak House by Charles Dickens (best ebook reader for laptop .txt) 📕

“And who have we got here tonight?” says Mr. Bucket, opening another door and glaring in with his bull’s-eye. “Two drunken men, eh? And two women? The men are sound enough,” turning back each sleeper’s arm from his face to look at him. “Are these your good men, my dears?”

“Yes, sir,” returns one of the women. “They are our husbands.”

“Brickmakers, eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What are you doing here? You don’t belong to London.”

“No, sir. We belong to Hertfordshire.”

“Whereabouts in Hertfordshire?”

“Saint Albans.”

“Come up on the tramp?”

“We walked up yesterday. There’s no work down with us at present, but we have done no good by coming here, and shall do none, I expect.”

“That’s not the way to do much good,” says Mr. Bucket, turning his head in the direction of the unconscious figures on the ground.

“It an’t indeed,” replies the woman with a sigh. “Jenny and me knows it full well.”

The room, though two or three feet higher than the door, is so low that the head of the tallest of the visitors would touch the blackened ceiling if he stood upright. It is offensive to every sense; even the gross candle burns pale and sickly in the polluted air. There are a couple of benches and a higher bench by way of table. The men lie asleep where they stumbled down, but the women sit by the candle. Lying in the arms of the woman who has spoken is a very young child.

“Why, what age do you call that little creature?” says Bucket. “It looks as if it was born yesterday.” He is not at all rough about it; and as he turns his light gently on the infant, Mr. Snagsby is strangely reminded of another infant, encircled with light, that he has seen in pictures.

“He is not three weeks old yet, sir,” says the woman.

“Is he your child?”

“Mine.”

The other woman, who was bending over it when they came in, stoops down again and kisses it as it lies asleep.

“You seem as fond of it as if you were the mother yourself,” says Mr. Bucket.

“I was the mother of one like it, master, and it died.”

“Ah, Jenny, Jenny!” says the other woman to her. “Better so. Much better to think of dead than alive, Jenny! Much better!”

“Why, you an’t such an unnatural woman, I hope,” returns Bucket sternly, “as to wish your own child dead?”

“God knows you are right, master,” she returns. “I am not. I’d stand between it and death with my own life if I could, as true as any pretty lady.”

“Then don’t talk in that wrong manner,” says Mr. Bucket, mollified again. “Why do you do it?”

“It’s brought into my head, master,” returns the woman, her eyes filling with tears, “when I look down at the child lying so. If it was never to wake no more, you’d think me mad, I should take on so. I know that very well. I was with Jenny when she lost hers⁠—warn’t I, Jenny?⁠—and I know how she grieved. But look around you at this place. Look at them,” glancing at the sleepers on the ground. “Look at the boy you’re waiting for, who’s gone out to do me a good turn. Think of the children that your business lays with often and often, and that you see grow up!”

“Well, well,” says Mr. Bucket, “you train him respectable, and he’ll be a comfort to you, and look after you in your old age, you know.”

“I mean to try hard,” she answers, wiping her eyes. “But I have been a-thinking, being overtired tonight and not well with the ague, of all the many things that’ll come in his way. My master will be against it, and he’ll be beat, and see me beat, and made to fear his home, and perhaps to stray wild. If I work for him ever so much, and ever so hard, there’s no one to help me; and if he should be turned bad ’spite of all I could do, and the time should come when I should sit by him in his sleep, made hard and changed, an’t it likely I should think of him as he lies in my lap now and wish he had died as Jenny’s child died!”

“There, there!” says Jenny. “Liz, you’re tired and ill. Let me take him.”

In doing so, she displaces the mother’s dress, but quickly readjusts it over the wounded and bruised bosom where the baby has been lying.

“It’s my dead child,” says Jenny, walking up and down as she nurses, “that makes me love this child so dear, and it’s my dead child that makes her love it so dear too, as even to think of its being taken away from her now. While she thinks that, I think what fortune would I give to have my darling back. But we mean the same thing, if we knew how to say it, us two mothers does in our poor hearts!”

As Mr. Snagsby blows his nose and coughs his cough of sympathy, a step is heard without. Mr. Bucket throws his light into the doorway and says to Mr. Snagsby, “Now, what do you say to Toughy? Will he do?”

“That’s Jo,” says Mr. Snagsby.

Jo stands amazed in the disk of light, like a ragged figure in a magic-lantern, trembling to think that he has offended against the law in not having moved on far enough. Mr. Snagsby, however, giving him the consolatory assurance, “It’s only a job you will be paid for, Jo,” he recovers; and on being taken outside by Mr. Bucket for a little private confabulation, tells his tale satisfactorily, though out of breath.

“I have squared it with the lad,” says Mr. Bucket, returning, “and it’s all right. Now, Mr. Snagsby, we’re ready for you.”

First, Jo has to complete his errand of good nature by handing over the physic he has been to get, which he delivers with the laconic verbal direction that “it’s to be all took d’rectly.” Secondly, Mr. Snagsby has to lay upon the table half a crown, his usual