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

“I can answer for Miss Flite that they have,” said I, “for she promised to tell us what they were. Ada remembers?”

Ada remembered very well.

“Did I?” said Miss Flite. “Who’s that at my door? What are you listening at my door for, Krook?”

The old man of the house, pushing it open before him, appeared there with his fur cap in his hand and his cat at his heels.

“I warn’t listening, Miss Flite,” he said, “I was going to give a rap with my knuckles, only you’re so quick!”

“Make your cat go down. Drive her away!” the old lady angrily exclaimed.

“Bah, bah! There ain’t no danger, gentlefolks,” said Mr. Krook, looking slowly and sharply from one to another until he had looked at all of us; “she’d never offer at the birds when I was here unless I told her to it.”

“You will excuse my landlord,” said the old lady with a dignified air. “M, quite M! What do you want, Krook, when I have company?”

“Hi!” said the old man. “You know I am the Chancellor.”

“Well?” returned Miss Flite. “What of that?”

“For the Chancellor,” said the old man with a chuckle, “not to be acquainted with a Jarndyce is queer, ain’t it, Miss Flite? Mightn’t I take the liberty? Your servant, sir. I know Jarndyce and Jarndyce a’most as well as you do, sir. I knowed old Squire Tom, sir. I never to my knowledge see you afore though, not even in court. Yet, I go there a mortal sight of times in the course of the year, taking one day with another.”

“I never go there,” said Mr. Jarndyce (which he never did on any consideration). “I would sooner go⁠—somewhere else.”

“Would you though?” returned Krook, grinning. “You’re bearing hard upon my noble and learned brother in your meaning, sir, though perhaps it is but nat’ral in a Jarndyce. The burnt child, sir! What, you’re looking at my lodger’s birds, Mr. Jarndyce?” The old man had come by little and little into the room until he now touched my guardian with his elbow and looked close up into his face with his spectacled eyes. “It’s one of her strange ways that she’ll never tell the names of these birds if she can help it, though she named ’em all.” This was in a whisper. “Shall I run ’em over, Flite?” he asked aloud, winking at us and pointing at her as she turned away, affecting to sweep the grate.

“If you like,” she answered hurriedly.

The old man, looking up at the cages after another look at us, went through the list.

“Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach. That’s the whole collection,” said the old man, “all cooped up together, by my noble and learned brother.”

“This is a bitter wind!” muttered my guardian.

“When my noble and learned brother gives his judgment, they’re to be let go free,” said Krook, winking at us again. “And then,” he added, whispering and grinning, “if that ever was to happen⁠—which it won’t⁠—the birds that have never been caged would kill ’em.”

“If ever the wind was in the east,” said my guardian, pretending to look out of the window for a weathercock, “I think it’s there today!”

We found it very difficult to get away from the house. It was not Miss Flite who detained us; she was as reasonable a little creature in consulting the convenience of others as there possibly could be. It was Mr. Krook. He seemed unable to detach himself from Mr. Jarndyce. If he had been linked to him, he could hardly have attended him more closely. He proposed to show us his Court of Chancery and all the strange medley it contained; during the whole of our inspection (prolonged by himself) he kept close to Mr. Jarndyce and sometimes detained him under one pretence or other until we had passed on, as if he were tormented by an inclination to enter upon some secret subject which he could not make up his mind to approach. I cannot imagine a countenance and manner more singularly expressive of caution and indecision, and a perpetual impulse to do something he could not resolve to venture on, than Mr. Krook’s was that day. His watchfulness of my guardian was incessant. He rarely removed his eyes from his face. If he went on beside him, he observed him with the slyness of an old white fox. If he went before, he looked back. When we stood still, he got opposite to him, and drawing his hand across and across his open mouth with a curious expression of a sense of power, and turning up his eyes, and lowering his grey eyebrows until they appeared to be shut, seemed to scan every lineament of his face.

At last, having been (always attended by the cat) all over the house and having seen the whole stock of miscellaneous lumber, which was certainly curious, we came into the back part of the shop. Here on the head of an empty barrel stood on end were an ink-bottle, some old stumps of pens, and some dirty playbills; and against the wall were pasted several large printed alphabets in several plain hands.

“What are you doing here?” asked my guardian.

“Trying to learn myself to read and write,” said Krook.

“And how do you get on?”

“Slow. Bad,” returned the old man impatiently. “It’s hard at my time of life.”

“It would be easier to be taught by someone,” said my guardian.

“Aye, but they might teach me wrong!” returned the old man with a wonderfully suspicious flash of his eye. “I don’t know what I may have lost by not being learned afore. I wouldn’t like to lose anything by being learned wrong now.”

“Wrong?” said my guardian with his good-humoured smile. “Who do you suppose would teach you wrong?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House!” replied the old man, turning up his spectacles on his forehead and rubbing his hands. “I