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

We were to stay a month at Mr. Boythorn’s. My pet had scarcely been there a bright week, as I recollect the time, when one evening after we had finished helping the gardener in watering his flowers, and just as the candles were lighted, Charley, appearing with a very important air behind Ada’s chair, beckoned me mysteriously out of the room.

“Oh! If you please, miss,” said Charley in a whisper, with her eyes at their roundest and largest. “You’re wanted at the Dedlock Arms.”

“Why, Charley,” said I, “who can possibly want me at the public-house?”

“I don’t know, miss,” returned Charley, putting her head forward and folding her hands tight upon the band of her little apron, which she always did in the enjoyment of anything mysterious or confidential, “but it’s a gentleman, miss, and his compliments, and will you please to come without saying anything about it.”

“Whose compliments, Charley?”

“His’n, miss,” returned Charley, whose grammatical education was advancing, but not very rapidly.

“And how do you come to be the messenger, Charley?”

“I am not the messenger, if you please, miss,” returned my little maid. “It was W. Grubble, miss.”

“And who is W. Grubble, Charley?”

“Mister Grubble, miss,” returned Charley. “Don’t you know, miss? The Dedlock Arms, by W. Grubble,” which Charley delivered as if she were slowly spelling out the sign.

“Aye? The landlord, Charley?”

“Yes, miss. If you please, miss, his wife is a beautiful woman, but she broke her ankle, and it never joined. And her brother’s the sawyer that was put in the cage, miss, and they expect he’ll drink himself to death entirely on beer,” said Charley.

Not knowing what might be the matter, and being easily apprehensive now, I thought it best to go to this place by myself. I bade Charley be quick with my bonnet and veil and my shawl, and having put them on, went away down the little hilly street, where I was as much at home as in Mr. Boythorn’s garden.

Mr. Grubble was standing in his shirtsleeves at the door of his very clean little tavern waiting for me. He lifted off his hat with both hands when he saw me coming, and carrying it so, as if it were an iron vessel (it looked as heavy), preceded me along the sanded passage to his best parlour, a neat carpeted room with more plants in it than were quite convenient, a coloured print of Queen Caroline, several shells, a good many tea-trays, two stuffed and dried fish in glass cases, and either a curious egg or a curious pumpkin (but I don’t know which, and I doubt if many people did) hanging from his ceiling. I knew Mr. Grubble very well by sight, from his often standing at his door. A pleasant-looking, stoutish, middle-aged man who never seemed to consider himself cozily dressed for his own fireside without his hat and top-boots, but who never wore a coat except at church.

He snuffed the candle, and backing away a little to see how it looked, backed out of the room⁠—unexpectedly to me, for I was going to ask him by whom he had been sent. The door of the opposite parlour being then opened, I heard some voices, familiar in my ears I thought, which stopped. A quick light step approached the room in which I was, and who should stand before me but Richard!

“My dear Esther!” he said. “My best friend!” And he really was so warmhearted and earnest that in the first surprise and pleasure of his brotherly greeting I could scarcely find breath to tell him that Ada was well.

“Answering my very thoughts⁠—always the same dear girl!” said Richard, leading me to a chair and seating himself beside me.

I put my veil up, but not quite.

“Always the same dear girl!” said Richard just as heartily as before.

I put up my veil altogether, and laying my hand on Richard’s sleeve and looking in his face, told him how much I thanked him for his kind welcome and how greatly I rejoiced to see him, the more so because of the determination I had made in my illness, which I now conveyed to him.

“My love,” said Richard, “there is no one with whom I have a greater wish to talk than you, for I want you to understand me.”

“And I want you, Richard,” said I, shaking my head, “to understand someone else.”

“Since you refer so immediately to John Jarndyce,” said Richard, “⁠—I suppose you mean him?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then I may say at once that I am glad of it, because it is on that subject that I am anxious to be understood. By you, mind⁠—you, my dear! I am not accountable to Mr. Jarndyce or Mr. Anybody.”

I was pained to find him taking this tone, and he observed it.

“Well, well, my dear,” said Richard, “we won’t go into that now. I want to appear quietly in your country-house here, with you under my arm, and give my charming cousin a surprise. I suppose your loyalty to John Jarndyce will allow that?”

“My dear Richard,” I returned, “you know you would be heartily welcome at his house⁠—your home, if you will but consider it so; and you are as heartily welcome here!”

“Spoken like the best of little women!” cried Richard gaily.

I asked him how he liked his profession.

“Oh, I like it well enough!” said Richard. “It’s all right. It does as well as anything else, for a time. I don’t know that I shall care about it when I come to be settled, but I can sell out then and⁠—however, never mind all that botheration at present.”

So young and handsome, and in all respects so perfectly the opposite of Miss Flite! And yet, in the clouded, eager, seeking look that passed over him, so dreadfully like her!

“I am in town on leave just now,” said Richard.

“Indeed?”

“Yes. I have run over to look after my⁠—my Chancery interests before the long vacation,” said Richard, forcing a careless laugh. “We are beginning to spin along with