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

old lady’s hands stray about her as of yore, while she recalls, all in a tremble, what a likely lad, what a fine lad, what a gay good-humoured clever lad he was; how they all took to him down at Chesney Wold; how Sir Leicester took to him when he was a young gentleman; how the dogs took to him; how even the people who had been angry with him forgave him the moment he was gone, poor boy. And now to see him after all, and in a prison too! And the broad stomacher heaves, and the quaint upright old-fashioned figure bends under its load of affectionate distress.

Mrs. Bagnet, with the instinctive skill of a good warm heart, leaves the old housekeeper to her emotions for a little while⁠—not without passing the back of her hand across her own motherly eyes⁠—and presently chirps up in her cheery manner, “So I says to George when I goes to call him in to tea (he pretended to be smoking his pipe outside), ‘What ails you this afternoon, George, for gracious sake? I have seen all sorts, and I have seen you pretty often in season and out of season, abroad and at home, and I never see you so melancholy penitent.’ ‘Why, Mrs. Bagnet,’ says George, ‘it’s because I am melancholy and penitent both, this afternoon, that you see me so.’ ‘What have you done, old fellow?’ I says. ‘Why, Mrs. Bagnet,’ says George, shaking his head, ‘what I have done has been done this many a long year, and is best not tried to be undone now. If I ever get to heaven it won’t be for being a good son to a widowed mother; I say no more.’ Now, ma’am, when George says to me that it’s best not tried to be undone now, I have my thoughts as I have often had before, and I draw it out of George how he comes to have such things on him that afternoon. Then George tells me that he has seen by chance, at the lawyer’s office, a fine old lady that has brought his mother plain before him, and he runs on about that old lady till he quite forgets himself and paints her picture to me as she used to be, years upon years back. So I says to George when he has done, who is this old lady he has seen? And George tells me it’s Mrs. Rouncewell, housekeeper for more than half a century to the Dedlock family down at Chesney Wold in Lincolnshire. George has frequently told me before that he’s a Lincolnshire man, and I says to my old Lignum that night, ‘Lignum, that’s his mother for five and forty pound!’ ”

All this Mrs. Bagnet now relates for the twentieth time at least within the last four hours. Trilling it out like a kind of bird, with a pretty high note, that it may be audible to the old lady above the hum of the wheels.

“Bless you, and thank you,” says Mrs. Rouncewell. “Bless you, and thank you, my worthy soul!”

“Dear heart!” cries Mrs. Bagnet in the most natural manner. “No thanks to me, I am sure. Thanks to yourself, ma’am, for being so ready to pay ’em! And mind once more, ma’am, what you had best do on finding George to be your own son is to make him⁠—for your sake⁠—have every sort of help to put himself in the right and clear himself of a charge of which he is as innocent as you or me. It won’t do to have truth and justice on his side; he must have law and lawyers,” exclaims the old girl, apparently persuaded that the latter form a separate establishment and have dissolved partnership with truth and justice for ever and a day.

“He shall have,” says Mrs. Rouncewell, “all the help that can be got for him in the world, my dear. I will spend all I have, and thankfully, to procure it. Sir Leicester will do his best, the whole family will do their best. I⁠—I know something, my dear; and will make my own appeal, as his mother parted from him all these years, and finding him in a jail at last.”

The extreme disquietude of the old housekeeper’s manner in saying this, her broken words, and her wringing of her hands make a powerful impression on Mrs. Bagnet and would astonish her but that she refers them all to her sorrow for her son’s condition. And yet Mrs. Bagnet wonders too why Mrs. Rouncewell should murmur so distractedly, “My Lady, my Lady, my Lady!” over and over again.

The frosty night wears away, and the dawn breaks, and the post-chaise comes rolling on through the early mist like the ghost of a chaise departed. It has plenty of spectral company in ghosts of trees and hedges, slowly vanishing and giving place to the realities of day. London reached, the travellers alight, the old housekeeper in great tribulation and confusion, Mrs. Bagnet quite fresh and collected⁠—as she would be if her next point, with no new equipage and outfit, were the Cape of Good Hope, the Island of Ascension, Hong Kong, or any other military station.

But when they set out for the prison where the trooper is confined, the old lady has managed to draw about her, with her lavender-coloured dress, much of the staid calmness which is its usual accompaniment. A wonderfully grave, precise, and handsome piece of old china she looks, though her heart beats fast and her stomacher is ruffled more than even the remembrance of this wayward son has ruffled it these many years.

Approaching the cell, they find the door opening and a warder in the act of coming out. The old girl promptly makes a sign of entreaty to him to say nothing; assenting with a nod, he suffers them to enter as he shuts the door.

So George, who is writing at his table, supposing himself to be alone, does not raise his eyes, but remains absorbed. The old housekeeper looks at him, and